and the modest observation in the paper is that the schools will evolve. so that some of the instruction will look like it does today. but much of the instruction will involve some combination of using technology and online instruction and distance learning and so forth. that will be good for kids as though they'll have a chance to learn and whatever works most effectively for them. and will probably also end up costing a little bit less overall. >> so i'm going to ask one more. then the roaming mic should get ready to roam. i have to ask a federal role question, in washington. some people are taking away from the current race to the top competition the belief that if the secretary of education armed with dollars goes rocketing around the country telling states to change their laws, they will change their laws. is there a potential here for some of the changes that are

needed in the cost-saving area as well as some of the changes that secretary duncan is currently trying to advance? in other words, could a properly targeted federal program or policy of some sort help to bring about many of the things that y'all are recommending? >> one -- i mean, i think, the obviously one that comes to mind is that the administration has been very tough on the data front with the emphasis on the need for building comprehensive data systems, information systems about students and teachers. and most importantly, in eliminating the wall between student data and teacher data. which is to say we needed the data systems to identify who taught the kids. so we can help schools and teachers understand who's been successful and who's not. that's only part of how you evaluate teachers. the point is the more information that we have about what is working in the schools, the better able the districts will be to make wise decisions

about how to spend money on professional development, about which teachers to promote, which teachers to provide bonuses and additional compensation, and in the end, which teachers to remove. >> okay -- >> i would just add. i agree with that. the bully-pulpit, the beliefs so much what happens with spending, were president obama and some of the other leaders to step forward and chance some of the conventional wisdom to say it may feel like to you as a parent or a teacher or as a school board member that small classes are the solution. we need to really step back and look at what the data show and see that this isn't the case. and we need to hear some other things we should be doing. it will be absolutely gal gal

galvonizing. >> i think there is a huge potential roll there for the federal program. i guess i sort of think that people -- hearts and minds would be changed more on the quality of the instruction piece as opposed to the cost piece. i could be wrong. >> okay. mike? >> well, we -- you have to keep in mind when you get into the area of compensation that a lot of this is driven by court decisions and, you know, you can get on the bully pulpit and talk to the legislature, but there's some judges out there that a history of litigation that can be a challenge sometimes. >> okay. we have time for a few audience questions. as rick said to the previous

session, you must identify yourself, you must be brief, and it must be a question. go ahead. you with the mic? >> hi, ms. allen. it sounds a lot like the model you're describing is school of one. chancellor joel klein's new proposed individual learning assessment plan. is that a viable model? do you guys agree? can you comment on that? >> well, just to start, i love the school of one initiative. i think it has a lot of promise. and just for those that aren't familiar with it, the ideas that students spend some part of their time in this kind of lab. and there's a playlist of activities that they follow. and the playlist scribes -- describes some teacher-led instruction and some online. with a lot of assessment built in. and the things on the playlist

are targeted to the deficits that have identified in the learning gaps of each child. : >> and i think the great thing about the idea is that it has captured the imagination, partly

in its labeling, partly because it is in new york city close to where the media is located. at the "time" magazine picked it as one of the best education ideas of the year or decade. at any rate it is publicizing this concept. i think it is very important. there are lots of those around the country, not in media markets that you don't hear about, but that is the kind of thing that we are talking about for the future. >> are there cost savings built into it? >> it is set up to be cost-neutral. that was part of the idea of getting this approved. new york city is a very political place. they had to use exactly the number of teachers, exactly the same cost and so forth. >> hi. anna thompson. this is a question for john chubb. we have heard mention of open

source. you mentioned playlists. can you talk about the role and the enlightened self-interest of the textbook companies? what they're doing to move this foward and what they might be during to hinder it? >> are you sure it is enlightened? i don't work for a textbook company. i compete with them. this is -- i am speaking from the position that i am looking at this. the textbook companies are, i think it is fair to say the textbook companies are concerned about the evolution of this model. textbook companies have always supplemented their textbooks with instructional software, dvds and so forth that, frankly, anybody in education will tell you generally do not get used. but these are very big, very successful companies that are trying to figure out how to do with it. i would not say that they are, i

would now say that they are impediments, but i would say that if you look at the online offerings they are largely by a small startup companies that are not as burdened by the history of the past investments and the business practices. so right now most of the innovation in online instruction is occurring outside of those companies. if you read clay christian's book "disrupting class". clay has written about destructive technologies and a host of industries and how that happened. more often than not the existing dominant players in an industry are not the ones that introduced the innovations. the innovations come from small players to inject these new approaches around the edges. in public education if you're a regular kid you're likely not to see much technology. but if you have dropped out or you have a special education

need or you have some other extraordinary need that is where it is being used. so i think that what you're likely to see is that the technology is not going to come to the big textbook companies but around the edges. >> okay. hi. book and marshall center trust. i have questions that are related with regard to the cost. is there a strategic plan with regard to if we are going to implement the it protocol that it is going to be rolled out in x number of years? and if you're going to do that why not take it the next step further where you do the webcasting? if you have a master teacher all of those high school students could be subjected to that class, maybe 2-3 times a week and the other remainder is working on that instruction with the regular teacher in the classroom. i think that would be a much better way of saving costs.

also introducing kids to what they can expect when they go out in the future us. >> just quickly, i love the idea. i think one of the things we need to do is look at teachers who are the most effective. an initiative called the 3 x initiative because of this idea that teachers who are in the top quintile a performance, we should take those teachers and greatly increase their audience in various kinds of synchronous and asynchronous ways. one of them is through broadcasting. it just makes sense. teachers that are exciting and engaging should reach more students. and fewer students should be subject to unengaging and ineffective teaching. >> it is also possible the technology today for these great presentations to be more than lectures. that is, kids are passively watching a presentation.

they can be interactive, and it can be in many environments so that kids can click in to answer a question. also every college lecture hall today there is clicker technology. to help keep the kids engaged professors ask questions. every kid has a clicker. they click the answer. the responses come up. if it is well-used it provides information. all of that can happen online. so if 100 kids are logged into a lesson as the teacher is presenting he or she can ask questions. kids can respond online. kids can use that as a point of discussion. this is so much more than, you know, in the old days where mr. wizard was phenomenal, but imagine if mr. wizard actually interact with the kids as opposed to just be watched by

them? >> you know, it is not as just a question of cost savings. you are a lawyer you make more money if you have more customers. if they are exposed to 300 kids that could be a foundation for differentiated pay. >> just want to add when we think about technology we think about technology very, very broadly. textbook is a great piece of technology and i think we have to think of it that way. what we need so desperately is to have an entrepreneurial sector that promotes the development of new intellectual property for schools so that teachers are availing themselves of transformative technology. that technology could be better assessments, better lesson plans. these new organizations that are compiling great lessons so that every teacher has to kind of reinvent the lesson where they

introduce subtraction. you're going to have a distribution of qualities of lessons, and most are going to be mediocre and some are going to be great. why not allow all teachers to avail themselves of that part of the bell curve. so i think that we need to think of it very, very broadly and not juinstructional technology. >> technology based interactivity is going to takeover this archaic art form called the washington conference. i think we have time for one last question from back their somewhere. somebody, go ahead. >> hi. my name is christina whitter with the national youth employment coalition. i am hoping you could speak a little bit about how these hybrid models or this new way of thinking about educating students relates to dropout prevention, recovery, and helping students who may be offtrack to graduate get back on

track? it kind of relates to what someone mentioned earlier about moving away from time as a requirement for getting students credit and how that might interface with some of this technology that you're talking about. >> just very briefly there is probably more experience in that sector, actually, than any other sector with the new uses of instructional technology. when it comes to 95 when it comes to helping kids graduate from high school kids fail classes all the time for a host of reasons. districts are looking for ways for them to make them up. if they have to make them up the following semester or the following year than it cuts into their -- to the time that they have to take the additional credit that they need. if they try to do it in summer school teachers are trying to cram a year or semester's worth of instruction into four weeks. long days. that doesn't work very well.

with instructional technology let's assume that you have -- et's assume that there has been a failure of an algebra to class or something like that. let's assume that algebra to includes 180 days. instead of 180 lessons, perhaps, 75 lessons or whatever the number might be. once they master those lessons they have demonstrated they have mastered the course. it is not about to seat time. kids drop out of school for a host of reasons. some of which include, some of which include just being uncomfortable or unsuccessful in the initial environment. if you can create an environment where kids can work and make mistakes in the privacy of an online environment, one-on-one

tutoring from a teacher online you're giving them a second opportunity to succeed. it may or may not work, but it is a very different opportunity than they had previously. the early evidence is that it has promised. >> any closing comments from anybody on the panel? all right. am i correct that the next event is in the chinese room? the chinese are taking over everything. want to join me in thanking a terrific panel. [applauding] [inaudible conversations] [inaudible conversations]

[inaudible conversations] >> and as you see a break now in this all-day forum with educators from around the country from the american enterprise institute after the break it is a lunch break. we'll continue our live coverage. this conference is on school funding cuts in the face of challenges to improve student achievement. meanwhile, white house press secretary robert gibbs expected to hold his daily briefing. a look in at the briefing room now. scheduled to start right about now. we will have live coverage when it begins. until then a conversation on

role of the civilians in afghanistan, and this is from today's "washington journal." we will show you this until the white house briefing begins. >> william taylor, former ambassador to the ukraine and now with the u.s. institute of peace, the center for post conflict peace and stability operations. here to talk about afghanistan, in particular the civilian in afghanistan. want to start off by asking you the best way for the u.s. and its partners to get a functioning civilian authority in afghanistan? >> a fighting civilian authority has to recognize that the afghanistan people need to be represented in that civilian authority. so the afghanistan people are looking to see what kind of an organization they will put together. we would like to see an afghan. a lot of people would like to see an afghan in charge of

civilian organizations. the trick, of course, is finding a afghanistan person who could actually pull this international assistance together, pull all the work that the ministries, the afghan ministries are doing into a coherent focus efforts. the civilian service that we talked about is really an effort to get the afghan government to be in charge and to deliver services, whether they be held services or education services to the afghan people. in order to do that there has to be someone in charge, we think. a good candidate would be an afghan. a senior afghan that could do this, but with the ability to coordinate all of the assistance that is coming into afghanistan from various doners. >> host: in the absence of that the civilian surge who is coordination.

>> guest: there are several people. one is ambassador wayne. responsible for coordinating all the civilian assistance, u.s. government civilian assistance coming in. the united states government provides a very large percentage, well over half, of the overall civilian assistance coming into afghanistan. so certainly able to coordinate those assistance efforts. there are, however, other assistance efforts come in from other donors. the brits or the u.n. or the world bank. all of these different bilateral international donors are providing assistance. and that, ideally, would be coordinated in one place great. >> host: you see it as the role of the afghan government to choose this afghan person to be the one coordinator or to head up the effort? >> guest: i would think that the afghans need to be in charge. >> host: there are stores this

weekend and this morning out of can about about the cabinet picks, the selections of hamid karzai. cabinet crisis reveals karzai's weakening grasp. lawmakers unhappy with the president's pick. what is the concern over the choices? >> guest: president karzai has made two sets of choices. he nominated once slate of cabinet officials about 24 of them. seventeen were rejected by the parliament. the parliament in a healthy move is asserting itself. this is a good thing. have some balancing, checks and balances as we understand them. so the parliament looked at the first slate of nominees from karzai and did not like many of them. rejected them. the parliament did choose, did agree, and did confirm several of the most important cabinet choices from president karzai,

minister of defence and minister of interior which handles all the police, minister of finance, minister of agriculture. one of the big recipients of assistance. so the cabinet in this area somewhat. president karzai has recently submitted a second slate to replace those that were rejected the first time. these are lesser-known people. the second slate of lesser-known people. many people have not heard. many afghans have not heard. the international community is still examining. but they may be that technocrats or the technocrats that many people had called for that are needed in the second cabinet. >> host: the issue is civilian assistance in afghanistan with william taylor. our guest until 10:00 a.m. eastern. we will take your calls.

good morning. >> caller: good morning. i would just, it might be old hats of a gentleman, but i'd like to just express to the viewers what the geographical reality is as far as the leadership in kabul and the rest of afghanistan, how they stand approximately that and the kind of a real disconnect that there is between the government there now. and i will just stand back. thanks for c-span. >> guest: a good question. there are several aspects of the choice of people to lead the afghan government. one, as you say, is the geographical representation. here we do see in both the previous cabinet and the current cabinet an attempt to put people in cabinet positions from all over the country.

the second aspect is the more sectarian and tribal representation. president karzai made some promises to some of his supporters during the campaign, which happens all over the world. it happens in the democracies all over the world where you make promises to your campaign supporters. and in this case the promises were for cabinet positions. and that means that there are some cabinet nominees, as i just mentioned, some of whom have been rejected by the parliament, but some nominees who represents tribes that don't represent the whole country. this is a problem that president karzai is now having to face. as i mentioned, parliament has rejected several of these tribal representations. so this is, i think, a healthy thing, but it does put an important pressure on president

karzai to do, as you suggested, that is ensure that there is the country in the government. >> host: next up is rockford, illinois. >> caller: good morning. yes. my question is, you know, we have all of these strategies against terrorism. we try this. we try that. we try everything. once we get bin laden cornered we let him go. i mean, it makes no sense. they want this to go on for the rest of our lives? thank you. >> guest: you are absolutely right. this is not going to go on forever. we have an important commitment to that country. we have a moral commitment. we have an understanding of what we need to do to bring the people of afghanistan what they would like to have.

the afghan people have a responsibility to elect their leaders. the elected leaders have a responsibility to provide good government. if that happens then we can succeed in providing them with stability. that is going to be important. if not unlimited in time, unlimited in resources. >> host: the parameters of the military increased. beginning ramp down according to the president. what can you tell us about the parallel civilian effort. dustedj departmentjj and otherwisej to max what is the number, what is the time. >> guest: the state department, of course, has an embassy. we reopened that embassy once we were able to go back in after 2001, and i am very sure that the u.s. government through the embassy manned by the state department and many other agencies will be in afghanistan

for the duration. we will be there. the embassy will be there. the ambassador, the political adviser, the economic counselor, the assistance team. they will be there. that is a long-term commitment. it is not a long-term commitment to have 100,000 troops. of course we have about 70,000 now, and the president is adding another 30,000. that is not a long-time commitment. that, as you say, begins to come down at some rate, not clear, starting in the summer of 2011. our embassy there is there and committed to working with the government of afghanistan. >> host: the new york times writing over the weekend about selections. the bagram base. they write the agreement by the

afghan ministries clears the way for american military. what sort of concerns do you and others have about the afghans being able to take over a facility like that? >> guest: this is a very good thing to happen. for americans to be running the corrections system and the system up putting people in jail is not the end point that we want. we certainly want the afghanistan government and the afghans themselves to be in charge of people in jail. this is not something that an outside power should have to do for a long time. so i think this move to transfer the authority and responsibility for these jails or these prisons to afghans is a very good move and again demonstrates the importance. >> host: here is greenwood,

indiana. good morning. >> caller: i have a couple comments. one of my comments is the fact that it appears to me that karzai may be helping keep bin laden going and even telling him what we plan to do or acting as intelligence for him. karzai knows that as long as we are there he is going to be there. the other comment i have is i hear there is only 25,000 taliban in the whole country. maybe 100 to 200 al qaeda. i don't understand why our military can't take care of 25,000. there was a show that showed in "60 minutes" a helicopter flying over. they said, that is where all of the taliban are. why don't they just take helicopters and invade the place and get rid the taliban? that is my comment.

>> host: let's follow his up with his comments on muhamed karzai. are we imposing on afghanistan? a nonpopular leader? are we repeating the iranian experience? >> and we will leave to go live to the white house for today's daily press briefing. the president will meet with some of the organized labor community this afternoon to

discuss health care and presumably to get into that topic. we'll have more of a react when we get done with that. >> how would you say, how would you characterize his stance at this point? >> well, he supported the senate bill and that bill was, that provision was in that bill. for what it does in terms of changing the direction of health care costs. >> so what's his message to constituency represented by labor leaders today is clearly opposed to this? >> that will be happening in the meeting when. that meeting is over we'll have a chance to talk about it. >> he is confident about winning them over? >> we'll tell you that after the meeting as well. >> robert, there were a lot of reports out this morning that the administration is considering a fee on banks and i was wondering if you talk about that, what you're thinking of in that regard? >> i don't have specifics to talk about what will be in the budget. we'll do that certainly later in the month as we get closer to the budget. i would simply say, karen,

that the president has talked on a number of occasions, about insuring that the money that taxpayers put up to rescue our financial system is paid back in full. that's been the president's position. i think that's the least that taxpayers are owed. we'll have more details on budgetary stuff as we get closer to the budget being released. >> will we see something specific in the budget that insures that taxpayers are paid back in full? >> that's the president's, that's the president's goal, yes. >> just to follow up on that, you got a lot of questions last week about secretary geithner and, one of the main critsystems -- criticisms there he is too close to wall street, is the administration too close to wall street and i wonder what your response to that is? >> the president made a series of decisions with his economic team on what had to be done to stablize our economic situation upon

taking office. an economic situation that veered, quite honestly, not simply the worst recession since the great depression, but and economy that quite frankly teetered on the edge of larger collapse. the president has made a series of decisions, to take steps to get our economy jump-started, on a path toward recovery. i think if you, look at what people on wall street say about, some of our, economic decisions or our economic rhetoric, i think that alone disproves this was all about wall street. jake? >> on, in the middle of december, omb put out a memo all federal agencies how to calculate the stimulus, how to calculate jobs created and saved, saying that, among other things, it would be quarterly instead of updated more frequently than

that, and that also if somebody were paid, even, two employees of a library who were already working there are paid with stimulus dollars, those two individuals, they should count as jobs created by, or saved by the stimulus even if those jobs existed already. do you have, any further explanation about why this -- >> i haven't seen the memo but i'm happy to talk to them and put you in touch with them. i haven't seen the memo and don't know what the details are. >> okay. to follow up on a question i asked last week about freeing of the kazali, do you have anymore on that? >> no, i don't. >> that's it, i'm done. [laughter] get back with us when you can. >> on harry reid the president put out the statement over the weekend accepting his apology and i'm wondering why the president didn't talk in that apology, or in that conversation he had with him

about unfortunate language that was used, no mention of that at all? >> i'm sorry. >> when the president put out the statement or you put out the statement, that the president had this conversation he had with senator reid, there was no mention at all about the unfortunate language that was used. >> i think that phrase was in the statement about the fact that, the unfortunate choice of words by senator reid. >> well, it didn't seem like he went into, sort of anything more than just, i accept his apology, and, we move on from here. is there anything more to -- >> i don't have a statement in front of me but i think the president's statement said that, senator reid had called him about these comments. that the president called unfortunate. that he has worked with senator reid. he snows senator reid. the type of values that he has. the agenda that he's pushed in the u.s. senate. and, didn't take offense at

them. >> has president said anything more in light of what we've been hearing? it has been dominating the shows over the weekend and even this morning? >> no. that wasn't, something i heard the president talk more about today. >> and upon the, in light of what has happened with terrorism, terrorism threat, is there anything at all that the administration has plan to do, maybe a second tier priority that has been put on the back burner now because there's been, sort of ramped up efforts with terrorism, the attention and so much of the air sucked out with terrorism -- >> no. are you, you mean an agenda item that the president would be focused on that he is not because of this? >> right, exactly. is there anything else that the president -- >> again, this question sort of come in different forms throughout different times -- >> not juggling or you're handling too much question but is there anything that

you said, listen, we weren't planning on spending so much time focused on terrorism at beginning of the year. now we have to. there are some other things, some other priorities that might have to be put off? >> i don't understand. that is not the juggling question? i'm not trying to be sarcastic. i lost -- >> is it too much? realize, hey, you know we have to focus so much on terrorism, let's put something else back a bit. >> that is juggling question. >> balancing. >> that's, ah thanks for the crystal clear clarity of that. >> not the typical question -- >> i don't know how i didn't get that. >> i'm not saying are you guys juggling too much. the question is just, have you decided to -- >> are we not doing something because we're doing something in lieu of that? >> but my question wasn't are you juggling too much. are there anything that you would put off for now? -- these others that you weren't planning on. >> maybe i should have said no, and gotten out.

then's no. >> why did you say -- >> i did and was sought to understand the premise of, never mind. i would say this, dan, that the motion that, i think, let me say this i think inherent in your question, now that the president is having to spend so much more time on something like terrorism, that he wasn't, that there wasn't spending time on that prior to -- i would just say. >> [inaudible]. >> again question's pdb goes over the security situation and threat. the president has spent quite a great deal of time dealing with this. so there is, no issue that, that has not been discussed or worked on because of that. >> anything going on behind the scenes on immigration reform? >> no. i mean, i can't remember if the president has had any meetings on this recently.

but i can certainly go back and look through the schedule. yes, ma'am. >> when is the president going to know the an answer? >> i appreciate that. >> i, chip asked this question, on friday and, -- >> still didn't get an answer. >> well, she is nicer than you, chip. but that's -- >> it is a long time. >> not that we're inadequate. i don't, i don't, i don't see one on the schedule at least in the short term, which is, precisely what i said. >> [inaudible]. >> no. again, last time we had this conversation here about the president's media strategy i was informed by many of you president was overexposed. >> are you -- for not holding one. >> who in this room said president was overexposed. one person in this room said he was overexposed. >> we had a whole lot of questioning on that. >> let's take a poll. >> who at some point --

>> you not believe he is overexposed. >> that's one, right. that was actually quite well-phrased and one person -- >> the probability of -- >> who wants a -- [inaudible] >> who wants to win the lottery? okay. >> who is -- >> scratch and win, major. scratch and win. >> one person in the room said he was overexposed. one. >> that is not true. >> name one person. >> i will go back and look at transcript. >> we're not pundits. we're reporters. there are pundits out there. >> do you have a question, opinion. >> going back to wall street firms, three firms, goldman, morgan and chase set aside $47 billion i believe the number is on bonuses. does the president think that is appropriate and is there anything he has talked about or hopes to do, do something about that? >> look, chip, i think you heard dr. roemer, this

weekend and you heard the president throughout the past year talk about the continued divergence from, in always, reality what is going on main street and what is going on some of the firms on wall street. that, there are folks that, just, continue not to get it. >> is he doing anything? >> well the president has, has discussed ways of, well, we can, we have done stuff relating to banks that have received extraordinary assistance from the federal government. there is a lot less, as you know, that we can do with, with somebody that's not tied in terms of a direct correlation between money that's given through tarp. the president has repeatedly pushed and the house pass as part of their financial reform, a say on pay. we have, greatly encouraged,

anybody that is giving out bonuses and, executive compensation to tie it, not to short-term risk-taking but to long-term health of the company. as, most stockholders, and taxpayers would prefer and that is, give that compensation in stock. have it vest over a series of years, so that the health of the firm is first and foremost, not short-term risk that might, might have people making different actions. >> despite everything the president says, everything that he is proposed and everything that has been done this may be the biggest year yet money falling from the sky for these guys. >> chip, as i said there is a limit to what the president can do for firms that don't receive assistance from the american government. >> can he use the bully pulpit more effectively, get out there? he can pick up the phone and call these guys. >> i can assure you we had

not too recently with, with bankers in the roosevelt room included a discussion about executive compensation. i'd, i think they know where we are on this issue. >> fair to say they're not listening to him? >> they're not listening to the american people, chip. as i said, i think there is die veriance in reality what is going on in this economy. if you talk to somebody that is, in line for a huge cash bonus at a wall street firm, an a, small business on main street that is trying to get a loan, that's trying to get, some help and trying to get their business in this economy back on track, absolutely. >> when the president talks about this does he get visibly angry about it? >> absolutely. i don't, the truth is, i think the story that you referred to, was the one in sunday's paper. i don't, i don't know anybody, say for a few that, work for those banks that,

don't get visibly angry, in reading those stories, absolutely. >> do you think banks are forthcoming in their assets? why did they need these bailouts and paid them back almost immediately? >> i don't have any reason to question the financial straits they were in at the time in which they received tarp recovery money. i will say this, helen and the president strongly believes this. this was in many ways much their own doing, which is what gets people that much more exercised about this. and, i think what the president discussed and reason why the president pushed financial reform to assure we have rules of the road that doesn't let the type of activity that caused this to happen to ever happen again, forcing the american taxpayers to have to make decisions about the financial system collapsing,, or providing, tarp money for these guys. >> the 47 billion basically

throwing in the towel saying basically there is nothing i can do? >> there is little we can do legislatively. the president will talk about this, both in public and in private with these bankers. yes, ma'am? >> real quick on the funeral, will the president speak? >> i don't believe that is the case. i think he and first lady are just going but i think they're working on logistics. >> on the meeting with labor leaders today is the president's message to them, essentially tough luck, we're going to pass the cadillac plans or can he be persuaded? >> i think the point of the meeting is to have this discussion. we'll have more to say about that discussion at conclusion of the meeting. >> is this a position a good move? >> i think the president, obviously the president has a position and, we'll talk to them about why sees this as something that's important in the bill. >> okay. and, i think last week some senior aides we should expect more of a focus on the economy this week and i

wonder how we might expect that? >> i think on wednesday, we'll have an event in the local area to talk about some, some jobs ideas and some economic numbers. how i don't have the rest of the week schedule in front of me but i think over the course of the next several weeks you will see a number of economic events on our plate. >> how about, are you guys done in shaping jobs bill that is happening in the senate? >> well, i think the, we've certainly been in communications with the house and senate, about, different jobs packages as the president outlined in december here in washington. >> robert, just a follow-on the bank fee issue, isn't the bank fee being considered as part of the budget, isn't this something, a way to sort of address this question of bonuses? and, i have a question on calibration given 8500 banks in the country and a large majority of them would come in for a fee that would be

levied on banks. how would you -- >> i'm not going to get into details and specific on a budget that will be released at a later date. >> is that at the printers? >> when it comes back from, from kinko's, we'll be able to talk about it. not really at kinko's. that was -- >> what is your assessment of the situation in yemen now as a terror hotbed, if you will, source of kind of plots we saw on christmas, especially considering the comments that have come out of there the past couple days from the president of yemen and from a leading cleric there, talking about foreign intervention and what it would bring? >> well, look, as you well know, this has been on the president and the national security team's radar for quite some time. the security situation there, obviously remains quite

perilous. there are vast areas of, largely ungoverned space that have attracted al qaeda of the arabian peninsula and other extremist allies in yemen and throughout the region. i think the president's team have been and still are acutely aware of the threats that could be emanating and are emanating from that region. >> do you think this is for domestic consumption, whipping up comments about foreign intervention? why didn't the president find it necessary to say what he did in the magazine interview about the prospects for u.s. -- >> well, i think whether it was general petraeus or president obama, i think discussing whether, whether or not boots, american boots on the ground was something that was, something the administration was planning, is something the president

simply put to rest as not, not happening. >> [inaudible]. >> yeah. >> the president also says he is willing to talk to al qaeda members in yemen. to that point, yemen is not a haven for extremists. so this undermines the administration and the president -- [inaudible] >> no. i mean our position on, disrupting, dismantling and defeating al qaeda is not any different. today than it was several days ago. we have worked closely with the yemeni government to address threats that have come out of yemen. the security situation there, and we'll continue to do so. >> does he want to talk to them? >> well, our posture as it relates to al qaeda has not changed. >> make another pact with the banking one but in the context of that, we heard a

lot from the president over the course being against it. are you guys ruling out any sort of transaction tax or bank fee as a way to lower the deficit? >> i, i'm not going to add more in specificity to what i have yet to add to the previous four people that have asked. >> two people. >> two. >> so you're not ruling it out? >> i'm not ruling it in or ruling it out, how about that. >> like new jobs bill. on start, are you where are you guys on that? are you getting closer? >> we're working with our russian counterparts trying to find an agreement that frankly works for both sides. i need to go back and look at some notes whether it was this friday or the previous friday we had a negotiating team that headed to, headed over to make some headway on that but nothing as of yet to report. major. >> you said in answer to

ben's question about the cadillac plans the president supports the senate bill. will the president support the house bill? he put out statements on both and they have die very ent points of view on that question. is white house open in any way shaping level of surtax in the senate bill would apply to cadillac so-called health benefits? is that something that is negotiatable within the confines -- are these conversations -- >> i think the president looks forward to speaking with, with leaders today about about their ideas and their concerns and i certainly think the level is one of the topics that will come up. we'll have more to say about the meeting after the meeting. >> not talking about level would come up. i'm finding out if the white house is open to that level. >> we're open, with that discussion. >> not adjusting it? >> i don't think we would have a discussion if we're not interested in hearing their viewpoint. >> very good. on senator reid's comments and other advisors said it was poor choice of words. i'm wondering if you could

tell us what is better way to express what harry reid was actually saying? >> i appreciate the opportunity to, to not just speak for an elected official but speak as the senator from nevada. i just think that would be a weird place for me to go given, i would be up here doing impersonation all day, major. >> i guess what i'm getting at, there was nothing that the president found objectionable or untoward about what he was saying just the way he said it? >> the president didn't take offense, personally, but, believes that, as the statement said, this was an unfortunate choice of words. i think that's what the statement said. he knows -- >> unfortunate observation about his particular political strengths going into the campaign, is that what harry reid was talking about? >> i think senator reid, i have not read the book. later in the book makes the point that, not only did he

not think race would detract from but would be a positive for the campaign. so obviously it is a very poor choice, a very unfortunate choice of words but, the president got that apology from senator reid. didn't take offense to it and, as moved on. >> did you want to react any republican calls for him to step down or ascertificating there is double-standard here vis-a-vis the trent lott situation? >> i mean, i think you need to go back and, i think it is helpful to go back see what was said in the previous instance. i don't, i don't, i appreciate that some are drawing a direct analogy. i don't understand exactly how one draws the analogy to, a former majority leader expressing his support for the defeat of harry truman in 1948 so that strom thurmond would be president running on a states rights ticket. i don't see how that is analogous to what senator

reid was saying. i think, i mean i understand what people have to say on tv or to get themselves on tv i would suggest they spend about 20 seconds reading a little history and figuring out that, to draw that analogy strains, any intellectual enterprise or, any real reality in all sense of the word. >> on politics there are indications that massachusetts senate race is tightening up. dnc sent a top staffer there today. does the president have any intention to travel to massachusetts to campaign for martha coakley. >> the president doesn't have any travel plans to campaign in massachusetts. >> do you think the president has done right by a movement that was so much a part of his victory in november, the labor movement, that if he, has he done right by them? has he advanced their agenda

the way he should? >> i think the president has represented working men and women in this country. in everything that he's worked on. whether it was, making a decision to save two companies from going bankrupt, whether it was, pushing a recovery plan, i think a whole host, obviously of legislative initiatives that have benefited working men and women in this country. absolutely. >> robert, just one quick question, on the timetable on iran sanctions. you said last year we were looking, once end of the year came we would be looking at a decision. do you have, when do you hope to have a coalition together to move forward? is there any timetable? >> we continue to work with our partners in the p5 plus one as you heard the president said last year putting together the next steps moving forward.

i don't think there is some magic day which that all happens at the u.n., at least i don't have have that day. but we continue to, we will continue to hold iran responsible for living up to its international obligations. >> so you don't have a deadline in mind? the administration -- >> the administration is working both internally, on ideas that it could do as well as working with the p5 plus one in a broader series that would have the support of the international community. >> couple quick bookkeeping, or, scheduling issues. president going into the democratic issues retreat this week? >> i got that last week and i will look at, that's, thursday and friday or so? let me find that out schedulingwise. >> any closer to a state of the union date? >> not that i'm aware of, no. >> one of substance if i may. north korea is suggesting,

process, substance. >> counselor reid made that point. >> north korea's assertion that united states and it should settle on a treaty by the end of this year to finally, the peace treaty that would end the korean conflict and how that is important setting the -- issue as well. >> the north koreans are well aware of what they need to do to come back to, talks with, the six-party talks and dealing with this issue and that is, give up its, the idea of a, of a nuclear state on the peninsula. just as it agreed to do several years ago. if they're willing to live up to those obligations, then, we will make progress in those talks. but this is, this isn't a step for us to take. this is a step for the north koreans to take in living up to, living up to those

obligations. >> so your position six-party talks and solve the nuclear issue, then we'll talk about -- >> i think the way to have most constructive talks is for them to come back to the table, living up to the obligations that they agreed to and walked away from, absolutely. >> robert, question on the -- are you going to put out a list of attendees in advance of the meeting?. >> i can get that we'll send it out to you as soon as we're done here. >> you say have a readout or tell us later what form are you going to tell us? >> just -- >> question about the meeting itself. a lot of labor leaders saying recently been very hard for them to motivate members and mid-level leaders to do foot soldiering that democrat candidates will really depend on in the fall if they don't see progress either on cadillac plans or employee free choice act other things important to them. there is disillusionment in

their ranks. what can the president to say to change their minds? >> the president looks forward to having this discussion today. i don't, i think, working men and women in this country will be plenty motivated in 2010 about the choices that they have in front of them. i don't -- let me finish the answer and, i don't think, i don't think working men and -- >> meeting with labor leaders. >> working men and women. i understand. i understand. i think we're, we're talking about the same group of people, yeah. >> you're saying they will be plenty motivated because of? >> i think, when one lookings at what the president's agenda is and one looks at lack of an agenda on the other side in dealing with, any problem that, somebody in, a working person, middle class deals with, you know, i don't think it will be a hard

decision to make when one looks at the agenda on the president's side, what we've done to get our economy restarted, to make college more affordable, to bring health care to those that don't have it and to correct insurance imbalances for those that do, versus, i hesitate to, discuss what is on the other side, i haven't anybody on the other side discuss it except for, a series of decisions that they want to take us back to the same, place we were in before the 2008 election. i think, woulding men and women will ask themselves, who is on the side of insurance companies and who is on the side of taking insurance companies on? i think that will be an argument that will be front and center and i think, working men and women will make that decision.

>> we've had a long discussion about health care in this country over the past eight or nine months. we're not talking about 2000-dollar insurance plan that would not talking about 5000-dollar insurance plans. there's a difference between what the president has supported, which is at a 23000-dollar level, taxing an insurance company, that offers a

plant in excess of that amount versus what john mccain proposed, which was to end the tax deductibility completely for health care that's provided for in this country. i think they are fundamentally different -- i don't think that they are fundamentally different ideas. [inaudible] >> i read that, too. the point i just made to bill is the same. there's a difference between -- it's not inconsistent because what he was talking about are two fundamentally different think that removing the tax fungibility of any part of your health care and taxing insurance companies that offer a health care plan in excess of a 23000 ornament, they're not in the same ballpark. they're not in the same state

to. >> but the here and now point that the units may. one in four of their rank-and-file workers could be affected by the tax structure in the senate bill negatively. you don't dispute that? >> i'm sure that's something they'll come up in the present meeting today. the notion that somehow -- >> that's in implication of this adult. >> if you will acknowledge that what will -- that what the president has talked about and supports in making the point that somehow that's analogous to what he opposed with senator mccain's proposal isn't also close to being reality, right click. >> sure, but i've not gone down that road. >> in the image he were to travel down that road. [laughter] >> he doesn't hypotheticals, right. your spokesperson daresay you on that one. >> basically by what he said in the campaign which is those workers who did negotiate so they have better health care as that of waiting? >> that's something they will

discuss today. >> on two different topics, if i can. first of all, has the white house chief of staff signal to the present he is irritating the idea of leaving to run for any office or to do anything else because i think he addressed this on savannas new cable show the scene daily at 9 a.m. [laughter] >> no. i think he committed to savanna to be here through 2010. >> and that's nbc. >> are there any other high level personnel changes coming that you know that? >> none that i'm aware of, no. >> back to the wonton with transfers for just a minute. you've halted the ones to human. are you still going forward as before with repatriations to other countries? >> we are continuing to process whereby the task force evaluates all that other.

other, for the status of their case and to understand how in closing wonton will they they will be done to. >> so there's no other poll on any of the country? >> no. >> are people going into rehabilitation programs in any country at all? >> you know, chris, we -- this is like the third -- we just are going to get into specifics of agreements that are ultimately made in terms of transfer. >> but can you say are you referring to saudi rehab program right now? >> a-game, we're making determinations about making determinations about each case as guantánamo. >> is any one of those that you are suspending possible transfer into the rehab program? >> i'm sure they continue to evaluate. there have not been any pronouncements on that. >> last week governor schwarzenegger urges delegation to make sure california got the

same medicaid deal as nebraska or vote against the health care bill. does the white house support suspending that nationwide? >> i would say the president obviously understands greatly the fiscal situation that governors are -- find themselves in. i think a pretty good understanding of how the president feels is a big chuck of the recovery act, was for medicaid funding. to go to help states out of their fiscal situation. and the president wants to work with governors and understanding, in tough economic times and in tough budget times, taking on new challenges. so we're going to continue to work with the governor. i think that's early part of the discussion. >> back to yemen. the fact that the president of yemen is even talking about talking to al qaeda, seems to sort of throw quite a larger

conflict within the administration's policy that is the white house confident that the president of yemen is to be relied on to help combat extremism there? >> yes, as evident of the steps that he's taken over the last many months to do with it, absolutely. we believe -- we believe that the president is taking the necessary steps and we continue to support his efforts to combat extremism. >> two questions, robert. on friday you addressed rudy giuliani's comments that there were no domestic attacks under bush. and since then you devise the statement that he meant to say no domestic attacks on american soil since 9/11. >> i think that's accurate. i mean, you know. >> okay that winfast. >> i think what was missing was, right, what was missing from --

>> that's what it wanted to say. >> i can go through, look at vast numbers of examples. my point was that the mayor of new york had forgotten about an attack that happened in new york during that administration, and i was caught offguard by that fact. as i think anybody that might have been watching was sort of caught off guard by what he was saying and what he meant to say. >> you're satisfied in the codification? >> i would have to look at what other instances he has -- again, my point of contention was september 11, which i thought it was weird he had forgotten. >> there's a story on the front page today that says something like -- >> where is john? the joke is no good if he's not here. sorry. >> the headline is something to the effect that the christmas bomber was singing like a canary until the obama administration read him his rights.

there was a briefing last weekend, john brennan said something like, i don't know if he put the spine of a point on it, but is it true that they were satisfied they have gotten all the information that they could out of the suspect before he lawyered of? >> i think what i said and what john has said is the fbi questioned a terror suspect after the incident, and were satisfied with what the usable information that they got. absolute. >> there's nothing they left something on the field of? >> or on the table. >> why is the president going to campaign,. [inaudible] >> not on our scheduled to go to next week. >> why is it not on the schedule? >> it's just not on schedule. >> has he been asked to stay with? >> not that i'm aware of. >> is he concerned that she is a concern that she is just doesn't

make any sense. is he considered his current popularity ratings, goes up there, that he might hurt her campaign? >> no. >> so it's just not on the schedule. >> you didn't ask me that, it's not on the schedule. as a trip the president is going to make. >> it looks like the senate race in new york, what's the white house position on having a candidate like harold ford run for that since he? >> look, i think the white house is quite happy with the leadership and the representation of senator gillibrand in new york. and as many are in the supporting a reelection. thanks, guys. >> if we can get a chance for senator schumer to close deals this time around. >> stay tuned. [laughter] [inaudible conversations]

[inaudible conversations] [inaudible conversations] [inaudible conversations] [inaudible conversations] >> and white house daily briefing just concluded here. you watched it live on c-span2. we will continue our live coverage of an all day for him

with educators from around the country. on school funding cuts in the face of challenges to improve student achievement or that's from the american enterprise institute, and that should be coming up momentarily. in the meantime, an update on healthe legislation from an interview with a report from yesterday. we will have a listen to that now. >> as negotiations continue on a compromise, health care bill, have lawmakers made much progress? >> backing up a lot of these issues and working on the small things that the house has the meeting pretty extensively over the phone with their entire democratic caucus. and senate leaders, top senators like max baucus and chris dodd, harry reid, have been meeting on that as well. they are still trying to figure out exactly what the biggest issues are and how they're going to begin to try to resolve them. this is kind of step one of a

several stage negotiating process right now. but i think they really are trying to get this done very quickly. ante up a lot of these things are what they will have to solve in the caucuses. >> have a determine which version of the house or senate version they will work with? >> i think what we will see is how this will technically work from the legislative standpoint is the house is going to take up the senate bill, and insert in that whatever compromise they work out behind closed doors. so technically, it is going to be the senate bill that ends up getting past that in fact, i think there will be a strong bias towards a lot of the programs that are in the senate bill where they differ. but at this point i don't think a lot of decisions have been made on exactly how some of these issues are getting worked up here but there are a few areas like how they treat the high-cost insurance plan tax, a cadillac tax that's innocent don't. >> speaker pelosi and a number of democrat leaders are continuing to say openly that the house bill is better than

the senate. how does that affect negotiators efforts to get this bill passed? >> i think right now that sort of negotiating 101. the senate is the best deal we got to pass the senator. the folks and house are saying the house is the best deal and we have to pass the house bill. we are at a stage right now everyone is really sticking to their guns, and they want to say we got to go our way or no way adopted with going to see a lot more compromise in the weeks ahead. and there is the possibility that some of these decisions may be made and they're not releasing them yet just because they want to keep the rank-and-file members happy and show that they are fighting for those rank-and-file members bacchanal's. >> do we know yet how this bill will be paid for? >> i think that's a very open question at this point i'm dizzy, both bills have different revenue provisions. the house bill relies very heavily on a tax on the wealthiest americans. the senate bill has a wider menu of revenue raising options. one of those is the so-called cadillac tax. that's a tax on insurance plans

that cost more than i think $23000 a year for a family plan. the house hates that. labor hates that. but the president in support of it and the senate is as well. it's got a lot of support from health care economists. and so some form of that probably modified is going to end up in a house built as part of the forest that i think will be a blend of the two built. >> if they end up working on the senate bill, is it too early to know if the votes are there to get the bill passed? >> i think it's too early. because there is no margin for error in the senate, one little thing could upset the apple cart. how this is really going to work is the leaders in each house will be negotiating with each other, but at the same time they're doing that they will be constantly going back and forth to their members that voted for the bill saying is this okay? is this okay? and making sure that when they change something in negotiations with the other gender, they are not losing the post in lj and.

>> the democrats are holding a retreat later this week that we here present obama will be there and former president clinton. in the id with disney is about and what role the former president might have? >> it looks like present clinton, former president clinton will give an address on health care. he's the one who most recently and most famously tried and failed to pass it on health care overhaul back in 1993 and 1994. i have a sense that clinton is probably going to say something along the lines of reminding democrats to take a little perspective, what this bill means. you know, say hey, we know you guys have some policy differen difference, policy differences but the reality is you have to work this out to get a health care bill passed. getting a help their past is way more important than who wins on the cadillac tax, who was on the public plans, things like that. clinton has had a deck and a half perspective on this and i have a feeling he will try to impart some of that to his demo. >> log onto cq.com to read his

work. thanks. >> thank you. >> and now we are back at a conference hosted by the american enterprise institute. they are looking at how school districts can save money and improve student achievement, despite declining local, state and federal funding. they are just about to resume after a lunch break, and we will just look in. we're watching it live here on c-span2. [inaudible conversations] [inaudible conversations] [inaudible conversations]

[inaudible conversations] >> welcome back. thank you very much. i think we have a terrific start out her. this is of course the conference. the third panel we've entitled evidence that change is possible. the idea here is to give you some real sort of on the ground examples of what's possible and what some of the challenges are from a district perspective. i think it will be terrific and i think it will help wake you up if you had a heavy lunch. we have two authors into responders discussing today. will go in the order that you see them from your left you write. starting at the end we have nate levenson, who was superintendent of arlington massachusetts public schools from 2005 through 2008 antigun is managing director, disingenuity partners and his chapter is entitled first person cost-cutting success. after him will hear from reggie gilyard, who is a partner with

the boston consulting group where he's been since 1996, and he and his team have written a terrific chapter entitled large-scale cost-cutting and reorganizing. in responding to the thoughts we will have first-tier from william hite, just outside of d.c. from prince george's county. and second from mike skinner who is ceo of education industry group, advisory consulting firm hosting entrepreneurship and education and author of a recently released book if he can hold up for you if you like. so we will fall the same rules as before in terms of keeping a strict time limits and what not. so without further ado, let me jump right in. nate, you can lay this all. >> welcome back from lunch. i don't know what i did to deserve the post largest law. i will try to make this interesting enough and get you out of eight post largest of the. my job and my brief presentation is to convince you with some

evidence that what you heard this morning can be done. that if you do it will be effective and i think i can do both of those things. but i'm also going to tell you that it's so much harder to do than it should be. to put it in context, trying to get this to work, a bit about where i did this work or arlington public schools in many ways very typical district. 4500 kids, not too rich, not to pour. sum of each. urban, suburban, decent school system, it functions well, had a reputation for being well managed. everything about it was pretty typical, except the superintendent they hired. i was the first nontraditional superintendent in the state that i have spent 20 years in the private sector, and instead of having a degree in teaching i had an mba from harvard business school. the community hired somebody

like me, not because they were unhappy with what they had, but they really wanted something even better, bigger and bolder. the community was somewhat split about what bigger, better and bolder would look like, but the one thing they all agreed on was we needed a lot more money to get to the next stage. and they thought some in my leg might be able to help them get there. so one of the first things i did, was everybody was talking about money. we didn't have enough of it. i wanted to understand where did we spend our money. i wish i had read some of the papers from this morning. it would have sped up my process all lot. because when i came to arlington, even though we complained about money quite a bit, virtually nobody, not the superintendent, not the school board, not the cfo, actually knew where our money was spent. we had budgeted, but it didn't information. so as we did budget elaboration, we really were quite unfolded.

we had even less information on what was working well. there was a question earlier this morning about measuring, not just what you spend, but what results did you get. we had never done that, and with the culture class of a non-superintendent superintendent really start to show up was i wanted to know what was effective and what wasn't, as far as student achievement. and what we found was that many of my colleagues, people who worked for me, were incredibly uncomfortable with the very concept of doing that. and again, all this in the context of a poverty mentality, decisions, $10000, $100,000, huge huge amounts of money, which typically people felt we didn't have. so we lost a program to find where our money was. took about 10 months to categorize it, every which way,

analyze it. and while we were doing that, i was thinking once we figure out whou do what did we want to do, where did we want to go? and the same thing, the district had a strategic plan, but it had 157 goals. 451st priorities. you're laughing that they actually wanted me to implement all of them. i said, let's spend three months, get it down to five goals, we're going to stick with those goals for five years and we will have three, first priorities. that was the second a culture clash and it'll will play through all of our financial discussions. the reason we had 451st priorities, it turned out we had exactly 45 strong, loud constituent groups. and each wanted an equal share of the pie an equal share of importance. i didn't believe with limited resources everything could be equally important. but we did figure out where our

money was, we figured out what we wanted to do. it was reading, it was closing the achievement gap for students with special needs. it was creating what we call 21st century learners, people who could think and problem solve and not just memorize. and they were right. we were going to need a lot more money to do all those things that we were doing already. but what i told the school committee that i wasn't going to ask for any more money because there wasn't any tv ad. and i said we could find it in three places. by shifting funds, by saving money, and by substituting other people's money for hours. i'm going to touch on just a few of these things, hopefully you f them. but shifting funds. we, like most districts, get a lot of federal grants, and like most districts we were meticulous about spending within the limitations. we follow the rules. but i can say that less than a

dollar of those federal grants were going to our three or five top priorities. i'm not even sure if much of it went to the top 45 priorities. they simply were not aligned with what mattered most. we also started measuring program effectiveness. i will keep talking but if you can't see anything. we measured program effectiveness. nothing is more expensive and unfair to children than to spend money on something that didn't create any learning. and if you discovered something that did create learning, we put money there. and lastly, we did something that said learning per dollar spent, which is very controversial but i had two programs, a math program and an english program. they were both pretty good. the math program had greater gains for about one fourth of the cost. so we made our english program look like a math program. not because the english program was a good, but the math program

was better and more cost-effective. as far as saving money goes, i should've mentioned early, we were typical in a lot of ways that are spending per pupil when i started was about $10000, maybe a little more than that. very typical for the state of massachusetts. so we were not spinning a whole lot of money compared to other people, but we wanted to spend less money dierks of it would shift even more. two places, special education. you will not solve the funding dilemmas in any public school system without addressing special education. it is 25 to 30 percent of the budget, if you actually incorporate all the cost like transportation and facilities. is growing. so it's too big to take off the table. and if you really care about

kids, maybe you got to be honest with ourselves and to say for all that money, the results are not very impressive. and then substituting, as we work with outside agencies, social service companies, private practitioners to provide a lot of services to our kids, and we didn't have to pay for them. what did all this add up to? quite honestly, everything we could possibly have wanted. i won't read the whole list, but we were able to add a world-class breeding program, 30 minutes a day, extra instruction, five days a week, 20er kids, professional development, mentoring, dramatically increased, a leadership academy for aspiring administrators. teacher leader positions, 50 new ones that we even had executive coaching for our administrators. a lot of good stuff. i think more importantly, it's

not about what did you buy, it's what did y g wanted. this chart is my favorite, is it showed that would virtually eliminate the achievement gap in special education students compared to general education students in the state. and we started with a very big gap, like many other districts. and as we were closing the gap, we worked so important to note is we were decreasing spending. just as an industry have to understand it, spending more than as an always mean better results, and spending less doesn't always mean less result. it's what you do with the money and how will you use it. the other piece as i said we invested heavily in our reading program, and the results of students who started the year struggling increased dramatically. so it was an investment that helped a lot of kids.

and we could do that by shifting substituting, and saving. now, again i'm here to take it it's possible but i have to tell you, this is -- excuse me. this is not a happy ending story. every time we made a shift, did the kind of things that people talk about this t kind of results we're hoping for, i created a new enemy. and i use the graphics because i really did feel like i was being attacked. and those who are sporting the reform effort felt it was like a war. every single dollar shifted came from some group, one of those 45, that were really angry. even the results, and this was my naïveté, i thought we could improve that we could make a difference. that would mitigate the pain. strangely enough, it actually

insulted a lot of veteran people. veteran staff, that these new things were working somehow better than the old things, and that wasn't very good either. . .

>> from the outside world, state, federal, community, has to become greater than the pressure for maintaining the status quo. my superintendent friends told me no superintendent ever got fired because the kids can't read. you get fired because you shifted dollars around, you took away money from some favorite program that wasn't working. there needs to be external pressure. secondly, if school boards acted more like the senate, i know we're in d.c., maybe it's an analogy that will mean something. if school board members were elected for six years instead of three, if the elections were every two years instead of every one. typically they are elected three years. but a third of your board

changes over every year. it doesn't create the political stability for a school board that wants to support change. so i think in closing, yes, everything we heard this morning about doing more with less and raising student achievement is possible. we did it in arlington, i've seen it elsewhere. but it's not a call for more forceful superintendent. i think it's a call that allows superintendent to want to do these things to have the backing and the support and the political structure that will allow them to do that and keep their jobs. with that, thank you. >> okay. thank you, nate. reggie? >> oh, sorry. >> just give me one second. they are pulling them up in the

back for you. >> okay. thank you. while they are doing that, i'll introduce himself, reggie gilyard, i'm a partner with the los angeles office. thank you for the opportunity to share some thoughts with you this afternoon. first and foremost, i want to thank -- the contributing authors to our chapter. these are folks that contributed to both the work at the client site and also the writing of the chapter. for us, we spend a lot of time on the client site and doing the work. things like this happen on the magic time. i want to thank the people that spent extra hours contributing to this. three quick topics. the first is just an overview of the chapter that we presented. the key sources of savings and efficiencies that we found both in these examples but also examples in our work across the country with the school districts.

lastly, i'll spend the majority of the time here. just some important conditions for success. this morning, i think we heard from quite a few folks that were discussing the panel earlier that talked about some of the specific forces of savings. i'll try to leave more time to talk about the conditions of success and not reiterate too much of those sources of savings. in terms of the overview of the chapters, we've got three examples from our work with clients around the country. the first is an example of a large broad-based initiative looking at cost savings and efficiencies on a statewide level that looked at each of the school districts in the state and also the cost at the seawers particular example. a lot of the things that were mentioned this morning in terms of transportation cost, purchasing cost, utility cost, construction, et cetera. the other two examples in the chapter cover work that was done

specifically at central offices in two major urban districts in the country. and, you know, in those examples we talk about the use of set of tools that we call delayering. which has its roots in most of the work in that the private sector around the central office redesign work. just very quickly, delayering allows you to go through a diagnostic to change for the organization and set some targets for what you want to achieve. most importantly, in delayering, we work with the organization at all layers to redesign the new organization. i'll talk why that is important in this type of work. lastly you'll see the work at the bottom, the work that we've done is very rarely stand alone. typically, it's part of larger transformational offering of

work that's important to find the savings so they can be deployed either with more dollars to go to niche tyes that are important for systemic change within the school district. key sources of savings and efficiencies. let me hit on them quickly. many of them, i think they were touched on in the discussions earlier. the first budget is what we would call nonpersonal expenditures cost. we found savings in the purchases. whether that was in benefits contract or construction contract or utilities contract, there was significant savings associated with those costs. also nonpersonnel in nature were the savings associated with just changing policies and processes through the course of doing quite a bit of kind of deep process analysis work to identify pain points, identify redundancies, identifying places at the school-site level where

they saw it as well. that's why it's important to work with folks at the central office but throughout the school district. now, many of the nonpersonal expenditures in the terms of the tools that we use rely on some of the work from our corporate sector. looking at benchmarking. looking at scale analysis. also some that we've been able to take from the coronet into th the second bucket of savings with respect to central office, overhead and inefficiency. such things such as reducing the number of layers in an organization, also moving from suboptimal to more optimal stance -- spans of control. moving to reduce redundancy to align better with benchmarks that were found in other areas

of the district or also other areas in other districts. also shared services. it's something that we find offers some value also within school districts. now in conducting the work, at the very beginning we develop some guidelines with the central office leadership. so that the work is not just about cost savings, which is critically important. but it's also about making sure that when you look back on the work, you can say that you've been able to maximize the resources that are deployed down to the school site level, you've been able to increase the speed on which the decisions is made throughout the central office in relation to the school site, and also that you've been able to improve and at the very least not degrade the service levels that the school sites are experiencing when you do the work. we've been able to demonstrate this both in the public sector and also in the private sector.s

in -- couple of parts in the chapter in cost savings that we've been able to find that are described in the carpets. i won't go too much into detail on those. i just want to alert you to some of these. this is the state level work that i spoke to. this is an example from one of the central office redesigns that we did with a large urban district. looking at the number of layers between the superintendent and the school sites for the -- just the maintenance organization within the school district. showing that there were accessive levels of layers which were affecting not just the cost but also the decision making and the speed of decision making. and, you know, in our experience benchmarks would tell you five layers, six layers is much more optimal in terms of being able to affect that. here you see on the order of

nine. that is an example of some of the diagnostic work of some of the chicago public's work that we did with now secretary of education arne duncan. it's a pretty basic example of some span of control work that looked at just the four players of the organization. the ceo of kind of arne's layer being the first layer. his record being the second layer and so on. what you see here is 16 managers were managing one person. nine for manager two. with down at bottom, the average being 4.7 across the four layers of the organization. what it doesn't show is that there were also 77 individual contributors. these were people that weren't managing individuals at all.

but they were in the top four layers. in some cases, these are warranted. but at this level and at this scale, it's much more significant than you would see in many of the benchmarks. what our benchmarks would indicate somewhere between six and eight layers on average would be optimal. you get in kind of the higher level of that, you know, in the eight or nine with more transactional functions within a school district. such as kind of an invoicing or accounting payable for that sort of thing within the financial group. and, in addition, to just looking at the data and saying what is that telling us? we also spend a fair amount of time digging into the whys. so the results, when they are achieved, can be sustained over time. so the that impact can be retained. and in this case, the situation was that in many of the divisions, they had -- because they didn't trust the divisions that were responsible, they had

developed their own kind of small functions such as research and analysis, or such as financial budgeting or it services. and, you know, in that case, we developed kind of as we said a lot of small organizations that were replicating what another central function has been set up to do. so that's just a quick overview. again you'll find a lot more detail in the chapter if you have a chance to read it. i want to land on some important issues for success. this is probably obviously. but, you know, this is extremely difficult work. nate pointed that out in a lot of comments that he made. it's difficult on two of dimensions. at the very beginning, you want to set some targets. you want to under how you're

going to achieve them that's just one dimension of difficulty. the other is making sure the work is sustained. that the cost stay out and inefficiencies stay out over time. there are at least a handful of conditions to achieve the work that you do in our experience. the first is strong leadership. in chicago, the ceo, arne duncan who was, really, for him it was important to be transparent about the fact that they needed to have some change. it was important to set the tone that change can be critical. it can't be done alone. i think nate pointed that out well. a close collaboration between the team that you bring in to do the work and the client team. also kind of key stakeholders. folks that you know will be

customers of the services that are delivered. this cannot be the consultants project. it just won't work if it's the consultants project. the work needs to be able to survivor regime changes. and to be able to satisfy them, it can't get done without building ownership at all levels. that can only be done by bringing people into the design. the redesign of the new organization from day one through implementation. and then lastly, but not least, it's the rigorous attention to details. make sure you have a detail plan, commitments to task, initiative owners that can in some cases be pulled out of their jobs to actually drive this work. it's also important to have initiative tracking and follow up in a change management. change management is the hard side and the soft side of change. the kind of hard side of change which is building a very rigorous fact face so that you

can develop a case per change that people in the organization can rally around. and then the second the softer side. which is, you know, just extensive stakeholder engagement and feedback throughout the timeline through the start of the change through the implementation. thank you. >> great. thank you. reggie, that was terrific. bill, what do you make of these two presentations from the superintendent chair and pg county? >> thank you. and good afternoon, everyone. glad to be here with you. both papers were very interested. as a matter of fact, it reminds me of a report that i saw some time ago. in that report, i think it was from educational resource steals. i may be mistaken. in that report, it talks about if districts wanted to pay every teach teacher $125,000, provide individual instruction for every student that needed it or offer

smaller classrooms. all of the revenue that is takes in order to do that is already available. but it's one key point. that is that districts would have to begin from scratch. and many districts don't have the political fortitude or courage to begin from scratch. and as we just heard from the two previous speakers, nate and reggie, the money already existed for many of these things to occur. it is just how those moneys are utilized or in the case of prince george's county public schools, realigned in order to support the work that deals with reform. i want to begin by just giving you some information about prince george's county. we have 130,000 students. we operate 212 schools. it's about 15,000 employees. 10,000 of whom are teachers.

we have a $1.7 physical budget. over the past three years, we have cut an excess each year $100 million. we've reduced by 1500, the number of full-time positions, closed eight schools, and reduced hundreds more out of the central administration. however, during that same period of time, we experienced record numbers of students achieving the proficiency level with regard to the maryland state assessments. we implemented a new pay-for-performance plan. we also implemented a performance management plan. we saw record gains on graduation resorts, and the number of students both enrolling in advance placement and scorn on 3-4-5. over the past two years, we've

seen a 19-point gain in our s.a.t. scores. i think those numbers illustrate for many of us who do this work every day that while very tough, very challenging, and very political, many of the funds exist already to do some of the heavy lifting with respect to improving student achievement. in both of these papering i found it interesting for creating a process for building system that approaches time, energy, and resources must become a core pod of the work. one developed, these process as chronicalled in both papers allow the administration to determine what is most critical in support of student achievement. however, it also chronical the dynamic that new commitment --

the dynamic that new commitments would not likely meet meet the goals if all old structures were retained. somehow in education and this has been the case in prince george's county. somehow in education, when we tend to have an inflex of funding, what we do is use the dynamic of adding on. we add more programs. we add more initiatives. we add more strategies. but sometimes it seems that we are -- or very infrequently, it seems that we never go throughout the process of removing items. and the same holds true with funding. prince george county has been developed just by adding 1 administration each year on the base. which means that this year every department, every area in the

organization would increase by 5% if that was the overall increase in revenue. so we thought that in order to do many of the things that we wanted to do a different process for how we managed our school and school district. we have a set of commitment in prince george's county that deal with fundamental things. student achievement. showing effective teachers is in front of every student. operating inside of a system that allow us to performance manage our work. those were the commitments that we used in the establishing our budget moving forward. which meant that we had to take on a very different process. a process that utilized the performance management system, and look at everything against a

set of measures that we put in place and benchmarks. and inside of that system, what it allowed us to do was to look at core commitment, look at outcomes against expected outcomes and our desires against actual outcomes to determine what was having the best impact on student performance. we went through a process to zero base our budget. in other words, we dropped it down as if we weren't funding anything. we built a new budget around those core commitments. so it's the commitment became in proven student achievement are putting a highly effective teacher in front of every student. then those were the things that drove our budget. as a result of that, we had to make some very tough decisions. next year budget included

furloughs, reduction in force, it included closing schools. and although it includes all of those things, we understand that the work that we're trying to fund is our most critical work. in other words, some would have us eliminate access to advantage placement courses in the name of keeping individuals. however, if that core work is provide a college-going culture or provide access to college-going opportunities for all of our students, then our a.p., advantaged placement courses, are absolutely essential. as both speakers or authors have suggested before, this is extremely tough work. and it's tough in a climate where revenues are declining. it's also tough to eliminate a

person, or salary, or push another salary. that's the very minute that you insert yourself into a process that's very political. however, at the end of the day student performance and achievement actually should be the driving force for those decisions. as we used it in achievement to drive the decisions in prince george's county, what we have found that we can support the core work inside of their district that work that relates to reading improvement, college-going culture, and effective teaching. however, what we know though is that we can't support that work in everything else. which means that we have to make some pretty tough decisions about what stays and what goes. and the fact that we had some preexisting processes, like the process -- like the performance management prop seases. we were able to then go through

every department and determine if the core services inside of that department would get us to a decided outcome. if the answer was no, we were either eliminating of course those programs, those initiatives, or those people. and the people who remained were those that were supporting the core work of our system. and that was student achievement. so one of the things that i would like to leave the group with are a couple of things that i typically use. when i talk about our budget and budgetary process. that's ensuring equitable funding across all schools, restructuring the job of teaching, in other words, measuring effectiveness against student performance. creating school designs that promote the use of student learning data by teachers. we think models for high needs students in high need students. build school and district

capacity. as a matter of fact, for every once of accountability that we expect, we want to develop an once of capacity. we design our administrative support to support in power and leaders on the the use of data. and finally, involve our allies and foes early and often. with that, i think i'm out of time. i'm going to turn it over to the next. >> thank you. thank you, mike. >> thanks. when i was introduced, they said i'm an entrepreneur. entrepreneur sometimes like to sort of wing things. so i suddenly, i put my -- i decided not to use powerpoint. but i have twice the amount of content for the number of minutes allocated. i'm going to read and apologize in advance when i speak too quickly. here we go. good afternoon. i'm very honored and grateful to speak on today's topic which

resonated with me for three reasons. first, i recently had the privilege of collaboratives with rick hess on his new book series that he had called "new frontiers in education" on which i was one of the authors of the four books. my book is titled "social entrepreneurship in education: private ventures for the public good" it was released last week. much of the content is of the topic. my comments will be on the book's web site. secondly, the papers presented today were most interesting to me and offer compelling comparisons of expectations in deliverables as told by a business person who is in the line of fire and professional consultants with extensive experience in education. i found both papers to be quite small school in massachusetts and major consulting firm

focused on reorganization in the state of delaware as well as the cities of chicago and dallas. the third reason for my correction is the title. the penny saved is a penny earned is a well now axium. more on that later. i have used that throughout my career in education. the reason that i found the papers so complimentary was my own journey of transition from a 25-year business career to my relatively new career in education. my transition commenced in the late 1980s with a one-year fellowship at harvest kennedy school with the business government and education followed by five years of learning on the job apprenticeship. first i was the president of the foundation that i founded called a different september foundation that supported the boston university chelsey schools

partnership. i reported directly who was then president of boston university. since chelsey and arlington are about the same size within the same state, i can identify with nate's first hand experiences from my own and what i read about armington in the past. however, there are similarities, there are significant differences in the city's demographicking. of arlington, which is 1/3 white, 1/3 hispanic, and 1/3 asian -- i'm sorry african-american. where as chelsey is 60% hispanic and 20 asian. and at that time, the city of chelsey's financial condition was fundamentally insolvent. following my time working and then the different september, i went on to work the special assistant to the ceo of xerox.

during this time, as other committed to education practices. i can assure you that helping schools in education is not necessarily as much as a profit center is something greater than pro bono. but still company-committed support for education. the story of what was going on in delaware and chicago as with new american schools had its political challenges. change, mandates, and education do not come easy. their assignment was macro, and therefore, expectations for success were less tangible as -- not as raw and emotional as they were in the levenson paper. since these two papers resonated with me, that's reminded me of many of any frustrations of dealing with challenges issues of how drivers of change whether at the district of state level with frustrating issues of

institutional resistance to change and constantly accepting status quo. :

>> it's also not clear why this effort, why there was the effort in the beginning and hiring consultants and coaches versus building a team. particularly around the finances which was the superintendent's area of expertise tha. why not determine who should be the cfo from day one. the superintendent could lead and manage and tend to the educational priorities, which would be the primary mandate. without the full story, i was struck on the surface so much was done and what was said at the end of the paper and term lessons learned could address the original mandate of change, which was clearly not understood by all the core constituency in arlington. it reminded me to wonder what my mentor at the kennedy school, john dunlop, would have said and would have done in arlington. as a former secretary of labor under president ford and advise her to all presidents since

roosevelt, dunlop was a legend in labor negotiations that his neck was to reach out to all constituencies. however diverse and seek coalitions and a lime and interest which he did at harvard for decades with a novus regard and admiration whether they beat the janitors or the academics. could the town of arlington, the unions while accepting the limitations, the school board, community, parents and others, buy into the vision so that when issues like patrol guard service there was a context and the priority. it's a lot easier for me to ask, but i did wonder and i wondered why the financial acumen brought to the school district could not have been institutionalized in terms of the budgeting process. that identified a charter was mogul in and helpful to future superintendents. my comments on the delaware and chicago paper again relate to

the original mandate of the vision 2015 a sign that funded by the foundation of delaware. i thought it possessed all the components for successful effort and was particularly impressed with the early childhood initiative statewide. regarding salary advancement related to performance issue was not clear whether the recommendation of an analysis of merit pay and its benefits was ever quantified. the bigger question is why did not vision 2015 joining forces with the league committee established by the government of delaware of 2007. the issue of central procurement was interesting based on my experience. i was involved with companies who had attempted to this market and failed. examples of these are online suppliers and traditional school supply companies that invested

10 -- hundreds of millions of dollars only to find school resistant because of arcane system like the handwriting of voters and faxing of voters to the school. and little appetite for central purchasing. were there any recommendations on the consolidation of central purchasing. ignorant of the financial services industry slow down in delaware, cmyk good business, tackle school's financial offices and to assist in updating systems and technologies. it appeared that the transportation issue was a success but the rest of the savings listed were more at the preliminary point and not ready for implementation. the savings that were incurred in chicago were more specific, but the budget was 5.3 billion the savings 25 million, a substantial but a big number in context. before i provide the specific suggestions of my and others, i

would like to tell to my two favorite antidotes that relate to today's conference. a little over 20 years ago when john silver was running for governor of massachusetts, just after boston boston university was approved to manage the chelsea schools, he said that if you send your children to chelsea schools, you can get the same mediocre education as you can and boston for half the price. now, who said that was not about money? then, a few months ago, tom who was formerly in charge of education programs at the gates foundation responded to a question on his blog about what he thought about the race to the top funding, to which he said if he were funding the program, he would rather give 500,000 to an education entrepreneur than 3 million to a school district. it does made the point. regarding my final comments for potential cost savings i would like to say i possess a bias which is too full. first i am an entrepreneur and not a policy person.

are an academic. while the company that i founded in 1993 as a research coming to our research was more market sizing and analysis. i do certainly respect the value of research, but much of my research on this topic is more qualitative than antidotal. my second bias is that our country has no real sense of urgency that we spend too much money on education. we continue to do so with little accountability such as the recent $787 billion stimulus bill of which 100 billion was outdated to education. with virtually no strings such as withholding some for cost-saving. and little discussion of the cliff in the year 2011, round the corner. i would stress firsthand in chelsea when the city was in receivership and the city and boston university made things

work with a lot less than its peer cities, that they had to. today the city of chelsea and its new schools all new build, is fiscally solvent and the schools are performing well. they are at the top, albeit the lowest level in massachusetts. so in preparation of this i decided to speak with a former accountant, in the romney administration and then was appointed the head of the control port of springfield, massachusetts, in 2004. when the city was fiscally insolvent and the state came in to help not bail out the sense i am out of time to let me just give you these key takeaways. the city budget at the time was 500 million. have other schools, half of the city. these are the savings that they brought in. they received 52 million a non-interest-bearing loan. within two years they had earned that back. the money still is in the cat

account. they have earned that back in savings. they did on the outsourcing of the janitorial services, on the food services, they did it on outsourcing of their health care. they did on the other insurance coverage and they did it on consolidation of purchases. they did because they had to. now i would say, in anticipation of a question, did that improve their outcomes in school performance? the answer is unfortunately no. they still are at the lower end of the testing. massachusetts does very well, but in overall mcas but there certainly is an achievement gap. but, i can assure you they had marginal improvement, and the savings can be implemented. and i would like to leave with my final and i refer to the axiom of ben franklin, a penny saved. my axiom that i view, a tribute to were over 250 years ago which

has kept the enthusiastic about education, is energy and persistence, call for all things. terrific. thank you very much. i think that is a good lead into the theme that all four of you talked, which centers around politics. clearly they're all political challenges and pitfalls, trying to undertake any real deep financial reform. let me start with you. you talked about going from 45 priorities to three in three months. and then of course you said there wasn't a happy ending at the end for you. mike asked basically, i think you intimated, did you take the time, was there ever the really buy-in from going from 45 to three. what kind of political lessons do you draw from that? >> i think that's a question i'm asked a lot. so i present that means i didn't do a good job on it. but interestingly enough, what we wanted to become was not very

controversial. we wanted all kids to be able to read at grade level by third grade. we wanted all kids by 12th grade to be able to think and understand their places in the world. these are not actually controversial. people heard these ideas when we did, eunuch, a zillion public forums. people said yeah, that's what i want for my kids. so we really didn't have a philosophical fight over where we wanted to go. the problem is i'm just as some others have alluded to, to get there, had to undo half the decision. so the problem is home economics. we actually had a department that taught how to wash her clothes. we had purchased new washing machines. that wasn't a key part of our 21st century skills that. you have no idea how angry the home economics department -- how family consumer science. home economics, how angry they get when they are not part of

that new future. and i don't know how you tell somebody that you've been doing something for 20 or 25 years, and it's not going to be one of our core areas going forward. and to pay for moving forward. we are cutting that back substantially. so there was buy-in nowhere to go, there was not buy-in from everybody who is impacted. i wanted to get there. and even a year and a half since having left, i don't know what we could have done differently that's going to make those people any less angry or any less happy. but if you guys have ideas, i would love to know. >> and so, bill, let me turn to you. in your year or so into your tenure, it was a three-year story. you feel that your will will be sustained in a long-term and if

so, how are you doing so, particularly when you're talking about some pretty serious cut you describe to a? >> i think the strength of the political will is good until your next budget decision. but i do think that these things, if you can build and i'm going to use my good friend and colleague from montgomery county, i'm going to use the term from doctor wiese. always talks about the northstar. the northstar is where everyone expects montgomery county to be. and for us, it is ensuring that all of our students have access to college, without remediation. and we also want 80 percent of the kids to enrolled in college, or universities or at least be successful in career and tech plans. and what were funny as most parents want that to. most parents want that as well. so it really hasn't been pushed back from our parents at large,

as much as it is for our internal stakeholders. and mages use an example of whole. i thought in his paper, the crossing guards represented another very good example of that. while half were not being used, the culture inside of many school systems is, these are experienced employees, dedicated employees who have spent many years supporting the system so the system should then support them. and i think that in the few short -- in the one year that i've been in my tenure in prince george's county, we are seeing some of the same things. however, we're beginning to change the structure and as student structure increases, i think it carries you with some momentum to the next tough decision and tell you make that tough decision. and then we don't know who is still standing behind us.

>> he said the money is in the people. and he mention of course the 100 million savings coming partly from people. you that laos. you that changes in compensation it sounds like. can you tell us more about that? >> be glad to. in that budget process, we meet monthly with all of our labor unions. and talk about revenue. we talk about all the revenue that we have. and part of that was to create a transparent structure so that they were informed in terms of their remarks and budget meetings, and to their constituents. but part of -- part of what the dynamic is in prince george's county, was $1.7 trillion. and just over 80 percent of our budget is in human capital. and so when you are starting to cut $100 million you are in the third year of cutting $100 million, we could cut every program, every piece of

curriculum, every material. out of our budget and still not arrived at that amount of money. and so what we're trying to get people to understand is that, and they are beginning to understand the come is that you cannot arrive at that that type of cut without dealing with human capital. and then it becomes what is the process you use for determining which human capital you're going to target, but i think that becomes the important part around what we attempted to do inside a performance budget structure. >> let me turn to reggie, and mike. you both bring a bit of an outsiders perspective, in terms of your consulting work. reggie and my, you, you had a terrific quote about preferring to give $500,000 to an entrepreneur than $3 million to a school system. so the question i would like to maybe push for both of you, is what kind of reforms, what kind of cost-cutting reforms do you

really think are essential to kind of company outside or have an outsider's perspective and work on versus the kind you have seen to be driven from inside? is there a distinction there? >> when you see from the outside -- >> a consulting firm. >> is a great question. i think that in our experience with both private and public sector companies, we found that there is really in many cases you will find that you don't have all of the analytic tools or the skill set within the organizations for doing some of the work around identifying the opportunities. and it's not a question of whether or not people, you know, have the capability. it's the background. you have many folks and are usually so, come from an education background. where as they are educators before they got to the central office. being able to be able to bring

some of those analytical tools i think is very helpful. a place with the internal, the internal capacity is really critical is just the experience of around constructional side, the experience around what happens on the school site so that the work that you do does not have a detrimental impact to teaching and learning. i think that's a critical thing that we really always go into each of the engagements thinking through, so that we don't come in with this view that we know out of the business of education, but also the instructional piece of education, and we try to marry what we do with what people on the inside know about not screwing up what happens at the school cycle. >> i would like to go back to what bill said before my overall comment, but because i ran out of time, i didn't get to the quote from the head of the control board in springfield.

and as i said there was a $500 million total budget, about 250 million for the schools, tway 6000 hits. and they were loaned 52 million are able to pay it back in savings in two years. and it was about equally distributed between the city and the schools. what bill said, you do, the human resource factor, the 800-pound gorilla in the realm is merit pay, teacher performance and the union contract. and he said that that was, when they took over springfield the contract was intact. and it was totally enforced without the whole time, the only thing was a freeze of increase in pay. but everything else, and nothing related to performance. they effectuated 26 million of savings. of cost savings. it would have been a lot more than that just on performance. so that is an issue that has to be on the table. now generally speaking, i don't

see myself necessary as a consultant. as an operator i can tell you i love what i do, but this is the hardest business. it's very easy to comment on it. but it is very hard to operate. so i have a lot of empathy. when we were at adventures, we insisted on hiring people who were involved in education, and business. not like these 10 story of a ride where everything is really bad and money on the teachers and not respected for what they do. so the things that i would look out at the top, really there's not a sense of urgency. i refer to that in my comments. i don't understand it. i really don't understand why we just transfer payment from the federal government to the states, and the thing is so massive and states change their legislation to appeal to these whatever else to the race of the topic and we are not addressing some of the core issues. and no strings attached. so that's frustrating. it should come from the government but it should also

come at the level of the superintendent in the school, the school administrators. in order to do that, that is the other challenge, because with just such a rapid turnover, i use in my presentation, the term institutional memory. so much happens in so many people come in and they reinvent themselves. we heard of our client. one orun in boston. but when he left, it's back to reinventing it. and whereas in new york, mayor bloomberg has really made education his top roadie. he's run for a third term or whatever. he spent a lot of money to do it but his heart is in the right direction for education. and they are creating institutional memory. why have all these consultants spent all this money? that's what i was talking about charter accounts, merging the work of bcg with the state of delaware. we are in this thing for the long hall to get someone like david says it takes decades and

we're making progress, then we certainly have a lot of data to deal with. so i think it's about leadership. i think it's about sense of urgency. i think it's about institutional memory, and while there are no easy solutions. i am an optimist so if you take that queen of mary that i talked about, we have turned the ship. >> let me ask one more question before we turn to the audience. one is to talk about the need for institutional capacity, in the superintendent's office, the ability to make these sorts of changes and sustain them. at the same time we know that administrators staff are often on the chopping block for when it comes time to save money and make budget cuts. can you have a more streamlined organization? that's also more effective than has this nasty -- how do you get

there? >> i've been in prince george's county three years now, and i arrived in prince george's county with the former superintendent, john daisy, who was the sixth superintendent in 10 years. i'm the seventh. we arrived, and when we arrived, there were in excess of 30 individuals on the executive staff. and now there are 15. but the work has changed. so it's 15 individuals with capacity that getting at the core work, and reggie described a process in chicago that was also in the paper, the layering. and we've had to look in turnley at our structure, but while we knew we're going to lose individuals and lose some capacity, we also had to focus on what was the essential work, the essential processes and the

essential systems in order to operate inside of a system of performance management. so we don't have as many people doing some of the same things, but i think we're doing it better. >> just the other piece, i know when we talk about house containment or structures, generally speaking there is nothing more popular by superintendent can do than to cut administrative. at least with the public not so happy interrater but i think there needs to be a caution about that. particularly at the building level. our fixation for all the monies should go into the classroom, i think there's a pause of there. teachers are not supermen and superwomen. but we kind of structure our system that here's a class, you're on your own, go do wonderful things. and spending money to make those teachers much more effective, like reading coaches, like data analyst, we want teachers to look at data.

some of them aren't that good at it. and why not have somebody in the building who does it for them? so i think if we moved towards looking at what investments are driving improvements, if a reading coach is raising racecourse, that's a good thing. if that reading coach isn't raising reading scores, that's a bad thing. and i think sometimes particularly at the building level, not so much the central office level, we are actually understaffed in what might be called middle-management. >> great. let's turn to the audience. remember the ground will. introduce yourself and please be sure to ask a question. >> in the back. >> hi. my name is jim. i'm a new york city public school teacher and have been teaching for the last 10 years in both new york city and oakland, california, both very difficult district that i've had to really tighten their belts that i apologize i'm a little late, but right now i'm serving

as an einstein to hear at the national science foundation so it's given me a chance to kind of look back at may the sixth or seventh talk in the last four months where i've heard people talk about new york city and what's happening in new york city as a model. and i'm concerned about a couple of things. one question i have is what this kind of institutional memory because i think that teachers provide a really great basis of institutional memory. and that there is not a real line for teachers to go to once they have been designated as a really great teacher. so once that teachers us know how to use data or was that teacher does not have to make results or does create an innovative project or program that works, often the next poll is gobi and administered. go work for the district. and there's not really a good program to keep teachers in the school, in the school sites as maybe a middle manager level, because the option usually propose to teachers much like

myself is, why don't you leave the classroom and go do something else? so i'm wondering what you have any thoughts about how teachers could be pushed into the sort of middle management roles, and if i'm redundant because you are a talked about this, i apologize. and how teaching, teachers themselves can be used to provide institutional memory. >> i couldn't agree more. when we think about cost effectively raising student achievement, and not to dove into the merit pay conversation, but one of the things i've noticed a lot of teachers want is if you're a great teacher, you want to show the greatness that if you get great ideas, you want to share them. and the way we are currently structured, you are kind of a teacher or you are and administered. and that's it. and for a typical elementary school, there might only be one administrator for 25 or 30 teachers. so 24 of you are out of luck any of. i think leading positions, we did in arlington, where teachers

would demonstrate great achievement, became coaches, part-time. they still had a classroom. they helped write the curriculum. to help mentor the teachers. we paid them a small stipend, very cost effective but it motivated and rewarded very strong performer. the only catch is, if you do not measure student achievement, the people who get these positions are the ones who have been there the longest, have the most friends, shout the loudest, or simply appeared to be the most fun in class. i love what you're talking about, after you've identified, truly identified whose very successful in the classroom. >> since i referred to new york and use the term institutional memory, you know, that's the trouble sometimes with a conversation. but i clearly and i think i referred to the importance of

educators and teachers, and you can't have success in education with that good teachers. and they have to be respected. they are the tool. they are the cure for our future. and as an entrepreneur, you would be surprised to see how many entrepreneurs and businesses are seeking funding for teacher or professional development, for training, for tracking, for coaching. and there is a real commitment from a business point of view, and antidotal lee, doctor silver as president of boston university was pretty controversial but he had very strong principles when it came to teach a quality. he felt that boston university's graduate school of education was not able model for the teachers that he was trying to support in the chelsea school's. so he raised the standard at a

minimum bar, in those days maybe it was a low number, but it was 1150 minima on sat. they lost 80 applicants to fill the class. to stand behind the respect for teachers to get better teachers, and the grad school so they would have higher quality people in the school. it something that professional development is high on the priority, certainly of anybody that's looking out for our future. . .

>> sure, thank you for the question. we're doing a actuarial study right now that will get at what it will take in terms of initial investment to have early retirement system as incentive. that was actually an recommendation from the teachers union representatives in those budget meetings that i described. however, to the second part of your question, that was really is not designed to get at low performance. if i was following your question correctly. and i think that the other way to get at that is through our new evaluation process that's connected with a pay-for-performance program that's looked at the collection of evidence and artifacts and looks at student data to determine the effectiveness of the teachers in all of the

classrooms. and the individuals who supervise those teachers, principals, and individuals who supervise prince pals. it all becomes a pet trick, if you will, for all they are evaluated. so i do think that this notion of looking at early retirement as an incentive for some individuals who may be interested but don't want to make that step. that's one thing. we're looking at -- we're studying that to do a cost-benefit analysis. but we are also on the flipside of that really looking at this notion of effectiveness. how do we define it? what measures do we use? what measures of student performance are used with that? what are we doing to help support teachers who need to be developed. or have those features help

support others. that's the way you get at the notion of nonperformance. but i don't think one should be used for the other. >> i like most of that. and just cautious that early retirement is a double-edged sword. state of massachusetts did put in place statewide an early retirement incentives. at least half of the teachers and half of the administrators who took it, i beg them to stay. it's the good, bad, inbetween that all retire early. and so many of the people who we wanted as curriculum developers, as mentors, it's just the leaders in the building that set culture and the expectations. retired. i don't see necessarily the linkage between you've been there a long time, and we'd like you to leave.

>> how did you go about putting your plan into effect? talking about work plans? whatever feasibility studies, how did you do it in a way that was cost effective? number one. and then could be sold to the community at large as well as a community partners? we applied for and were success in getting a grant. one was with the susan michael dell and another was bro foundation and still another with was the gauge foundation. that allowed us to work with consultants like boston consulting group that helped advice us in the structures around developing such a system. so than it became how we

marketed that internally so that people both had an understanding of it, and understood what their targets were benchmarks were. >> we weren't as grant worthy. we did a different way. i made it the core job of the administrators and the core job of the school board was to create the plan and monitor the plan. so, for example, over 50% of our school board meetings were discussions of best practices. they looked like college classes sometimes. the school board read case cabinet meetings with my senior leaders man three or four hours every two weeks. we didn't talk about parking and early dismissals. we built the plan. we used the meeting to review the data. we made it the job of the people in charge to develop the plan, implement it, and monitor it. and i think they will tell you

that it made their jobs and their days even longer than they were before. >> they just reminded me of one other thing. i will add that if -- he reminded me when we talked about the conversation with the board of education and infrastructure, the board of education, all went through a training program together. all of the board leadership and as a result of that, they thought -- they were thinking more reform-minded if you will. we have policies now like a policy -- like pay-for-performance policy. they have a policy about core principals and values. and it allowed them really to operate differently as a board.

it's been interesting to see them evolve over a period of time. for us to end on. we are out of time. please join me in thag our terrific panel. [applause] >> we will restart at 2:50 sharp. please be back. thank you. >> the past panel of the day is coming up. the topic will be overcoming until then, a conference with

press secretary gibbs. >> no, no, no. i did that. nevermind. one quick announcement before we get going. tomorrow the president and the first lady will travel to willington to attend the funeral on jeanne biden. >> thanks. will the president sign a bill that will not include the tax on the cadillac health care plan? or is that man tour for him? >> well, the president will meet with some of the organizized labor community this afternoon.

>> how would you characterize his stance at this point? >> he supported the senate bill. that provision was in that bill. for what it does in terms of changing the direction of health care cost. >> so what's his message to a constituency represented by the labor leaders today that clearly is opposed to this? >> well, that will be happening in the meeting. when that meeting is over, we'll have a chance to talk with you. >> is he confident about winning them over? >> we'll tell you that after the meeting as well. >> robert, there were a lot of supports out this morning that the administration is considered a fee on banks. i was wondering if you can talk about that, what you're thinking in that regard? >> i don't have specifics to talk about what will be in the budget. we'll do that certainly later in the month as we get closer to the budget. i would simply say, karen, that the president has talked on a

number of occasions about ensure ing that the money that taxpayers put up to rescue our financial system is paid back in full. that's been the president's position. and i think that's the least that the taxpayers road. we'll have more details on budgetary stuff as we get closer to the budget being released. >> will we see something specific in the budget that ensures the taxpayers to pay back in full? >> that's the president's goal, yeah?. >> yeah, just to follow up on that, you have a lot of questions last week about secretary geithner. and one of the main criticisms there is that he's too close to wall street. and the administration is too close to wall street. i was wondering what your response to that is. >> well, the president made a series of decisions with his economic team on what had to be done to stablize our economic situation upon taking office.

an economic situation veered. but in the economy that quite frankly teetered on the edge of larger collapse. the president has made a series of decisions to take steps to get our economy jump started on a path toward recovery. i think that alone proves that it was all about wall street. >> on the middle of december, omb put out a memo to all federal agencies about how to calculate the stimulus, how to calculate jobs created and saved. among the things, it will be quarterly than more frequently

than that. also, if somebody would pay. if two employees of the library who were already working there were paid with stimulus dollars, those two individuals should count as jobs created by or staged by the stimulus even if there's job existed already. do you have any further explanation about why this? >> i haven't seen the memo. but i'm happy to talk to them and put you in touch with them. i haven't seen the memo. do you have any more on that? [laughter] >> they put out a statement over the weekend accepting apology. i'm wondering why the president didn't talk in that apology or conversation unfortunate

language that was used. no mention of that at all. >> i'm sorry. >> when the president put out the statement on the president conversation that he had with senator reid, there was no mention at all about the unfortunate language that was -- >> i believe that phrase was in the statement about the fact that unfortunate choice of words by senator reid. >> well, it didn't seem like he went into sort of anything more than just i accepted the apology and we move on from here. is there anything more? >> well, i don't have the statement in front of me. but i think the president's statement said that senator reid had called him about these comments with the president called unfortunate. that he's worth senator reid, he knows the type of values that he has, the agenda that he's pushed in the u.s. senate. and didn't take offense to it.

>> do you want to say somebody more about that in light of what we've been hearing? >> no. it's nothing that i've heard the president talk more about today. >> on the -- in light of what has happened with terrorism threat, is there anything at all that the administration had planned to do on the back burner now because he's ramped up efforts with terrorism and the attention and so much of the sucked out. >> is there anything else? >> again, the question sort of comes in different forms throughout different times? >> have you never been juggling or handling too much question. is there anything that said,

listen, we weren't planning on spending so much time focused on terrorism at the end of the year. now we have to -- there's other priorities that might have to be put on 37 >> that's not the juggling question? >> i'm not -- >> i'm not trying to be sarcastic. >> just realize, hey, we have to focus so much on terrorism. let's put something else back a bit. let's move something off the front burner. >> i think that was a general question. i'm sorry. that's. thanks for the crystal clear clarity of that. wow. i don't know how i didn't get that. [laughter] >> i'm not saying are you juggling too much, the question is just -- have you decided to -- >> are we not doing something because we're doing something in lieu of that. >> my question wasn't are you juggling too much. is there anything that you are putting off for now?

>> i would say that the notion that -- i think -- well, let me say that. i think somehow now the president is having to spend so much more time on something like terrorism. that he wasn't -- that there wasn't spending time on that prior to? i would just say that, you know, the president's pdb goes over the security situation. >> anything going on behind the scene for immigration reform. >> i can't remember if the president has it any meetings on this recently. but i can certainly go back and

look through the schedule. yes, ma'am? >> not that you're an attitude. >> well, i appreciate that. chip asked this question on friday. and, well, no -- i'll -- well, she is nicer than you, chip. >> no, again, last time we had this conversation here about the president's media strategy i was informed by many of you that the president was overexposed. >> thank you for not holding one. >> we heard the president was overexposed. one person. >> no, we had a whole lot of questioning.

>> who wants a new fund? [inaudible conversation] >> who wants to win the lottery? okay. scratch and win, major, scratch and win. chip? >> you said he was overexposed. that's one. >> that's not true. i will go back and look at the transcript. >> we're not pun didn'ts. we're reports. there are repun didn'ts out there. >> do you have a question or opinion? >> okay. going back to wall street firms. three firms. goldman, morgan and chase has set aside $30 million on bonuses. does the president think that's appropriate. is there anything he wants to talk about? >> chip, i think you heard dr. rumor this weekend. i think you've heard the

president throughout the past year talk about the continued divergence from all in ways reality of what's going on main street and some of the firms on wall street. their folks that just continue not to get it. well, the president has discussed ways of -- well, we can -- we had done stuff relating to banks that have received extraordinary assistance from the federal government. there is a lot less as, you know, that we can do with somebody that's not tied in terms of a direct correlation between money that's given through t.a.r.p.. the president has repeatedly pushed and the house passed as part of their financial reform a say on pay. we have greatly encourage the

anybody that's giving out bonuses and executive compensation to tie it -- not toshop short term risk taking but to long-term health of the company. as most stockholders and taxpayers would with prefer. and that is give that compensation and stock -- have them invest over a series of years so that the health of the firm is first and foremost. not short-term risk that might have people making different actions. >> explain everything the president said and everything that he's proposed, and everything that has been done. this may be the bigger year yet for money falling from the sky from these guys. >> chip, like i said, there's a limit to what the president can do for firms that don't receive assistance from the american government. >> is the bully pulpit more effectively? he can pick up the phone and call these guys? >> i can assure you the meeting that we had not recently, not too recently with -- with the

bankers in the roosevelt room included a discussion about executive compensation. i think they know where we are on this issue. >> i'd say they are just not listening to them. i think there's the reality to what's going on in the economy. if you talk to somebody that is in line for a huge cash bonus at wall street firm. and a small business on main street that's trying to get a loan. that's trying to get some help and business on track. absolutely. >> the president talked about this. does he still get angry about it? >> absolutely. i don't -- i truth is i think the story that you're referring to was the one in sunday's paper. i don't know anybody that works

for the banks that don't get angry in reading those stories. absolutely. >> it has been forthcoming in their assets. why did they need the big bailouts. they made them back almost immediately. >> i don't have any reason to question the financial straights that they were in at time in which they received the t.a.r.p. recovery money of i will say this, and the president strongly believes this, that was in many ways of their own doing. which i think is what gets people more exercised about this. i think the reason why the president has pushed financial reform is it s to ensure that we have rules of the road that doesn't let the type of activity that caused this to happen to ever happen again. forcing the american taxpayers to have to make decisions about the financial system collapsing. >> on the whole, is he throwing

in the towel? nothing i can do? >> i think there's little we can do legislatively. the president will continue to talk about this both in private and public. >> real quick on the funeral. will the president speak? >> i don't believe that's the case. i think he and the first lady are just going. i think they are working on logistics. >> okay. on the meeting with labor leaders, the president's message >> we're leaveing the white house briefing which you can see in it's entirely at c-span.org. for more live coverage on improving education while cutting funding. this last panel is barriers to change. it's just getting under way. >> and a third paper by marty west that we asked him to think about and reflect opinion leading up to and during today and that he is going to author upon reflection on the conference. we will also hear from two

familiarly energetic and thoughtful. i'm confident that we are going to have a heck of a final conversation. the first up is readily could have been presented last panel. looking at how some districts across the country are attempting to do the work and are overcoming the barriers is written by june kronholz. june is a washington, d.c.-based writer who previously worked for the "wall street journal" as the bureau chief in boston and deputy chief in washington and she covered education issues for a decade. the second paper will be bidet see childress, and lecture you are at the harvard business school and the cofounder of the public education leadership project at harvard university.

she studied entrepreneurial activity in the united states. her paper is entitled investing in public school districts for allocation. the third up will be marty west. he's an assistant at the school for education. he also is on the journal "education next" as deputy director on the program of education policy and governance at harvard university. before joining the harvard fact illty, he taught the brown and was a research fellow at brookings institution. we will then have two substitutions. first up will be lily. he's an elementary teacher from utah who serves as vice president, the national education, association. she is one of the highest ranking labor leaders in the nation. and one of the hispanic educator

s. and a she's a member of the white house strategy session on improving hispanic education. and last but not least, on a long day, is dwight jones, cross' commissioner of education since 2007. and in that role, twilight continues -- dwight continues as public education. he has refocused his efforts on serving and supporting the field. and striving to direct resources and intervention strategies to the districts with the most need. speakers are going to take about 6 to 12 minutes. we will have that timed. after that, we'll open it it up with a conversation and then we'll take it to the audience

for what we hope will be a substantial conversation on questions and answers. with that, june, would you please get us started? >> thank you, rick. my role was to call around to superintendent and cfos to learn how the people who were responsible for putting together and meeting a budget are dealing with the leaner times. most school districts spending, i'm sure you know, is on salary and benefits. most of that is on salary and benefits for teachers. that mean to cut cost you either have to pay teachers less or to pay less teachers as the colorado financial analyst told me. grammatically, that should be fewer teachers, i know that. but it didn't have quite the zing. rather than make the hard choice or perhaps because union contracts are state class size mandates don't allow to make that choice. i found a lot of districts are drawing down, they are relies on

the federal stimulus dollars or they are playing a game of chicken. threatening to end all of the kindergarten or to trim a couple of weeks out of the school year if they don't get the money they are asking for. but i also found some good ideas for saving or even raising money. nay are listed, dozens and dozens of them in my chapter. a lot of them are about schools, restructuring jobs, that sort of thing. but i like to talk. you can read all of those. what i'd like to talk to you today about is tell you a few of the ideas that come under the heading that i'm calling some nonobvious ideas that i like. note that the title isn't some ideas that will work or some ideas that will save you money. a lot of the ideas at the cfo has offered me resulted in savings of thousands of dollars. not millions of dollars. they are not going to close the

budget gap. some people are doing some thinking. i wanted to tell you about some of the things. so in not particular order, here are some of the ideas that i like. christopher is the ceo of the pittsburg public school system. he's absolutely rolling in ideas. when i called him this summer, he just went on and on. let me tell you three that he offered. in the mid '90s, the school district, and water authority backaged their outstanding tax leans and sold them to a debt collector. lots of cities do this. the three jurisdictions got cash for their lean. but nothing happened to the property. so in 2006, the school district bought back it's leans for $2 million. he told me this was pennies on the dollar.

the district recouped it's $2 million outlay in two years. which means that everything since then has gone into the district's bank account. just as importantly, the district has put property back on the tax role, even through treasurer sales or more aggressive collection. the gift that keeps giving. it moves the processes of claims to the finance office from the personnel office. at the same time, the district became more aggressive on safety. among other things he told me, i love this, the local's electrician unions sponsored a week-long course on workers safety including a session on

scaffolding training. in 2004, pittsburg recentrallized the printing and out printed a new shop with high efficiency tops. now teachers e-mail their printing jobs to the shop. the shop brings copieses on the food distribution trucks. he's undercut kinkos and he cut the copy by half. low-skilled workers do the job instead of higher paid teachers. david peterson is the cfo and associate superintendent of the scottsdale district in arizona. last year peterson pushed through the state legislature a low that would allow arizona schools to set up solar power plants on their roof beginning this year. the idea is this, peterson's

district doesn't have the capital to build a solar power system, what district does? but the federal government is giving generous tax incentives to investors to power. peterson also doesn't need the tax incentives, since he's not paying federal taxes. under peterson's plan which districts across arizona see as a template, they were all telling me that they were looking forward to trying this. investors who build solar-power on parking lot. the systems will heat, cool, and light the school and potentially feed into the grid on weekends and evenings. those systems will yield tax benefits equal to as much as 50% of the investment in the first year. that includes federal alternative energy, tax credits, and rapid depreciation. these are peterson's numbers, not mine. don't hold me to them. the benefit to the district is equally great. it's a study energy price. peterson said he's locked in the

rate of 11 cent for kilowatt hour for the next 20 years with the companies that will own the solar plants. that's compared to 12 cents an hour he's paying now. he plans to charge students and staff to park in the parking lot. if you think only sun belt states can do solar power, milwaukee has one school that's running on solar power. and they are starting a second -- they'll be powers a second high school starting this fall. milwaukee? i also liked an idea from colds springs -- colorado springs district 11. they used a bond to build a fiberoptic ring around the district. that means they get ride of the cable guy and they are saving

$550,000 in a year in cable fees. i found a lot of districts focus -- not a lot. a few focusing on attendance. this increases the funding. but more of the point, to me at least, it goes to the heart of what schools are supposed to be doing. in california, district receive state funding based on how many days the student attended school the year before. that comes to 40 a day when the student attends and nothing when he doesn't. so long beach, unified school district, just one example, shifted ten of the social workers and counselors into a new truancy strike force. a 2% increase in attendance this year should translate into an additional $3 million in state support next year. although california's problems are so deep, who knows. but if it also results in 2% greater graduation rate, that's

a win/win situation, isn't it? milwaukee also has a particular innovative cfo. she gave me this idea. the district is paying for the computers with $24 million that the class action plaintiffs in the federal antitrust case against microsoft failed to claim. and that microsofted offered to the district in the form of vouchers. the computers will allow teachers to among other things use open source books and other online material instead of having to buy textbooks. i thought the fairfax county, virginia school had forged some agreements with the county that are worth looking at. the county maintains the school district buses as well as it's own. the school districts cafeteria

operations provide snacks for the county, senior citizen, and aftercool program. the counties services the school's vending machines, the district and the county do joint fuel. few other districts told me they are also sharing purchasing and operations with the local government. pittsburg, city, the district, and the county are all meeting every other week to share purchasing information among other things. they are bidding on rock salt together. other districts told me they are bad blood, if i will, between county and school district workers. they just can't possibly work today. my reaction as a taxpayer is get over it. if you have a spicey or retort, pass it on up. i like an idea that the group called the cooperating school districts which is 65 in the st. louis area had. the group compiled a report in 2009 on the effect of tax

abatement and tax holidays to developers with having on school revenues. the consortium is using the study to lobby to rethink missouri's tax structure. i wish them well. james lang is up board of coopive education services. he gave me a couple of ideas about better using teacher time. higher technicians to do science lab. pay department shares instead of giving them the one or two periods of release time as they get next. schedule larger phs. ed and consider what teachers do

after school that they could be doing during the day. the reason most specialized kids help them become more independent, but the opposite is coming. finally, i like the idea of asking to school district to take a look inside. last year, they produced a massive study of milwaukee's nonacademic and identified 103 million in potential savings. some of them weren't good ideas. mckenzie suggested milwaukee used cheaper food. but it was great, i thought, to have fresh eyes on the situation. other districts have enlisted parents, taxpayers, unions, teachers, school staffers, so on and so forth. we heard this on the previous panel and asked them to help. there's a three-page list of possibilities. the group rejected some ideases,

like eliminated the paper-based school directory, but it save for ununpopular cuts including eliminating school-performance bonuses. jefferson county increased the technology last year while cutting school jobs after getting the all clear from the citizen budget group. citizen participation doesn't necessary yield a lot of dynamite ideas. cfo told me that most people propose the same thing. they do give them the political cover to make them choices to pay teachers. they force, let taxpayers own the problem. the up side might be that they get people more involved not only in how schools are funded but also how widely schools are funded. >> thank you, june.

stacey? >> i mentioned i'm on the harvard business school. and have been involved in something called the public education leadership project since 2003 which is a collaboration between harvard's ed school, business school, and a network of large urban school distributes and their leadership teams. back in 2003, 2004, we collectively choice a set of problems both the leaders from the districts and the professor from the two problems that needed to work on together. i'll share the ideas with you this afternoon in the paper that i use for this conference actually come out of that work and in particular are based in cases that we examined in three cities around the country, san francisco, new york city, and montgomery county, maryland, just our neighbor here today.

much of what we've heard from the last couple of hours from the individual superintendent view of strategy and tactics to a more general set of ideas that come from a number of superintendents and their activities. but also what rick asked me to do specifically was -- is there anything in the management literature was resource allocation and strategy in complex organization that the relevant to what we've observed across to number, about 20 around the country that we've worked with since 2003/2004. i'll try to share that with you as well and two pretty quickly through all of it so we can two particular areas. through the rest into your question. it's all about driving-improved so the basic idea here is given all that you've heard all day performance that make use of today and all that we've fewer resources that you observed out in the field, there currently have been using. that's the point of you here. are ways thinking about. jim guthrie this morning said near the end of his panel that

it really is all about leadership. when we started our work six or it's all about improving cost in seven years ago, we hoped that wasn't true. because if that is true, we thought that the context that urban district leaders work in and the rapid turnovers rates particularly in the largest 100 districts made it difficult to imagine we'd ever see very much progress. what we found is it's actually sort of true. leadership and we found no district that were driving any rapid improvement in any segment of student achievement that didn't have a strong leader, whether at the district level or at principal level. but if that wasn't suv, there were lots of other things needed to be in place. the things the leaders did matter add great deal. that's what i want to talk to you ant today.

are we ready on that? here we go. you've heard this earlier today. i'm going to go quickly through the p. the prior economic environment over the last 20 or 30 years has actually made it possible for superintendent to layer. bill talked about this in the last panel. it was easy to start new things without having to cut because revenues were growing faster than inflation. any time a superintendent came in, there were resources available. that's actually really rational. we criticize him a lot for that choice. but in the environments that they are in, it allowed them very quickly to do new things without alienating things before they get traction. the problem is we've seen today, it con trained performance. layering of activities not only is resource drain but over the long term what you find as many of you know that some programs throughout others. not just that we are spending resources on things that may be

doing the same thing. but sometimes these programs end up in conflict with each other. they aren't nearly as powerful as they could be on their own because of the layering that's happening. and the bad news and some ways the good news is this unsustainable. that's what the hole day has been out. you've also seen the data before in general terms. this is the data from the particular districts that i discuss in the paper, san francisco, montgomery, and new york. and the time frame here is the time frame in which the superintendent strategies that i describe in the paper were in effect. and what we see here is how district spending was growing relative to inflation over that same time period. just to give you a sense. and if you saw this year by year, you'd see the early years. and the later years, it was growing slower. and in california, it began to slow down. i just wanted to give you ascents of that. current challenge.

this is -- actually where the paper leads off. it's that it's not just about cost cutting at this point. there are increase performance pressures on district. so it's about more performance, more impact with fewer resources. the problem is that we heard this morning, there's not a habit in the sector and among the leadership capacity weighing against each other or against an overall strategy. which is a lot of what we'll talk about. neither of our bodies of work was there much knowledge about in a sector like education what were the particular challenges of running a large multisite organization as an integrated system versus a set of independent, individual units or a strongly centralized organization. and so that's some of the work

that we set out to do together. so when i say there's kind of a weak knowledge base, let me give you one example. nate referred to it late. where we could just get all of -- as much as possible the spending and decisions in the hands of people closest to students. by the way, advocates are principals. they are not talking about teachers. they are not talking about parents. people closest to the action. if they were making a vast majority of decisions, then we'd get better decisions. these folks would make the best decisions. that is both true and not true. one the things that we've been working on is what's an alternative? the problem with the theory is that large multisite organization that are expected to act as integrated are

actually much more complex than just putting resource decisions in the hands of front line people. they are systems that have a single accountability. people are expecting district to do some level. even when you do that, it's still significant resources in the hands of central administrators and mid level network level or regional level. administrators and so the question becomes what do you do about those? 85% of the school level resources are in control. they hire teachers. because most of the money is tied up in salaries and principals have autonomy about

the teachers they hire. 87%, but the trick is only half of the money in new york city is in schools. and so the other half of it is in the hands of other people. public sector not in schools by the way. integrated product firms, service firms, or lots of studies about this. the initial scholar that kicked us off, in his review, looking back on 30 years of work, that he kicked off. his observation was this problem of having some topdown direction and accountability for performance in shaping bottom up resource practices at the unit level to support that is

actually very difficult. and it's not necessarily a unique problem to public education. this is a problem than solved at the unit level or headquarters level. it's something that has to be thought of. there are actually three instances. even if you have a dramatically decentralized approach to resources and other ways. one of those is if there's an opportunity that will benefit the entire system, and the cost of that opportunity is actually beyond the spending limits and control or budget size of any one or small collection of units, it actually makes a lot of sense to think about that centrally. it's not decentralized or centralized. there are some de -- decisions

that might be made better. they have few lot about that today. and another one is whennt f cuts stoinghing is necessary, and there are really powerful incentives in place for decentralized decision makers to it continue to do them. these are things, again, that years of management literature0 that say even in a system that is highly decentralized, like new york city, there is a way to think about tind of centralized decision making that will produce some results that make the decentralized spending that goes on more powerful. i mention the case examples. you can read the tales of these in the paper. one is about the school

initiative in san francisco. the autonomy accountability exchange in new york city. they have some common features. all three of these were about reallocating resources differently based on the needs of students. new york and san francisco did that by allocates resources by the way of student formula attached to studentses. montgomery did it by growing, spending, more rapidly in underspending school that had most of the low-income by holding constant in the other. basically, funding investments in some schools while holding constant or cutting invest. s in others. way to think about this. and then i'll wrap up. it's that any of these resources decisions and any of the cause and effect. so rather -- whether it's different kinds of students with

different learning needs in different levels of resources. whether or not it's john chubbs presentation this morning that that we really need is to think differently about using technology and classrooms. having a theory about why those choices will lead to results. and basing all of the ore decisions that get made. i know this sounds like common sense. but our observation, and i think the panels throughout the day today would indicate that it's not common practice to think about resources allocation or any of these other organizational decisions in that way. so very quickly, if you don't -- if you have a resource plan without a strategy, you're probably not going to produce. you might cut cost. but might not produce much in the way of results. if you have a strategy without the resource -- you need a strategy.

and final plug for my own work over the years is even in the paper that you'll read, the examples districts did some really terrific things. some of them worked. some of them did not. all of them produce some level of results that the superintendent were targeting. none of those things challenged the existing arrangements very strongly. and so while those are all worthy things within the existing arrangements, there are a better way to think about than others. the kinds of things that we talked about on the panel just before lunch. how do we really rearrange the way we think about schooling and the existing arrangement. the things that are going to get us to leapfrog over the current performance to something much more impactful. >> thank you, stacey. and next up is marty.

>> do you have it set up? thank you. good afternoon. i wanted to just start out by laying out my agenda. i want to do that for two reasons. one is that i may not get through everything that i'd like to say this afternoon. the second is that the paperer as rick mentioned is not yet written. that was by design. i want to point out. the idea was that we would talk about overcoming the barriers of the particular kinds of change that was discussed. what is means is at one chance, at least until you buy the edited volume when it comes out. i really have three points. the first that the the title for this session and for my presentation overcomes the barriers to change isn't quite right. in fact, there are very few

barriers to change. the question isn't whether change will occur, it's what that change is going to look pssures facing school districts already intense are going to increase. and june's paper provides a wonderfully colorful overview of district's ongoing efforts to respond to the decline in the economy in the last year. but clearly, there's going to be a need for increasing tough decisions and perhaps more importantly for a good deal of innovation as we go forward. we are trying to put off what will and what won't work and cost to maintain and improve levels of achievement. what we need to get that diagnosis correct if we want to come up with the right

solutions. and i want to argue that there's been many potential barrier that is we've discussed today. i want to make the case that the fundamental barriers are political. in particular, the political incentives facing the 14,000 elected charged with day-to-day management are not to seek productivity or efficiency. rather teachers unions dominate school-board elections. the general public has a very poor understanding of education finance, and is reluctant to support policies that may lead to conflict within their school districts. and state and federal policy which could be part of the solution actually more often tend to aggregate the problem. well, to the extent that diagnosis is correct, it should shape how we think about the policies that could help overcome the barriers to change. in particular, we need to think about measure that is will

change the political incentives and free them to seek efficiencies in the interest of both sides and the general public. so hopefully i'll fete you tell you whatke. let me try to provide you for some data. the journal of education next and harvard's program on education policy and governance. i'm one the principal investigators on the annual survey. i'll be drawing on our data as several places throughout the presentation. one thing that jumped out on me as i've looked about the american views understanding and support of the school finance that we've done this is that we've done a market support.

declined about 10% from his peak. really there was no sense of crisis or urgency. a year later when the dow jones was at it's bottom, we were in the field, fortunately, and we were able to see that american support for increase school spending fell by 15 percentage points. quite a sizable change. you need to take the levels that you see there with the grain of salt. but the change is something that i think we can learn from. we saw the confidence that more spending will improve student learning. also dropped from over 50% to just over 1/2.

interestingly, the grades that the american system built their schools on dropped to the lowest level. not just in the three years but going back as far as -- all the way back to 1981 rather which is how long they have been doing their annual survey. so it's quite possible that the support for confidence in our schools may recover in the future. but i don't think it's not -- i don't think it's obviously that that's going to be the case. in other signs, beyond public opinion, point in the direction of continued fiscal pressure. so rick mentioned this morning that the ongoing demographic transition in the u.s. or more elderly population is going to make things difficult for schools. here are projections from the u.s. census bur 225, those overl outrank the school age population for the very first time in american history.

by 2050, they are projected 120% increase in the senior citizen and only 70% in the school-aged population. :

abs and productivity improvements the outlook for u.s. schools is pretty grim and this is true even if the nation returns to more rapid economic growth and sees somewhat of a recovery in its education revenues. so what are the barriers to efficiency, enhancing changes? we have seen a lot of possibilities discussed today. when they came up earliest in the day in the first session really deals with a lack of information and you saw both marguerite rosa really intended to provide decision-makers within school districts with more useful information that they could have to make tough decisions that they would be called to make. note that i don't say a lack of raw data. in fact district right now are awash in data but there is a dramatic scarcity of information. that is what i am doing with

harvard's center for education policy research something called the strategic data project. we go in and provide a couple of fellows to partners school districts to going and increase their analytic capacity. we see that they have plenty of-- plenty of state of. the actually have a good deal of capacity. what they don't have as free analytic capacity so i think the analyses that my end marguerite rosann to some extent the consulting firms that use of present today are trying to address these concerns can be really vital to address the problem. but i don't think that is the only story nor do i think it is really the root cause of the barriers to change. the second possibility is the lack of know-how and i think if we are honest with ourselves we all would agree that we really don't know how best to transform our schools to be more productive. if there even is the one best

way to accomplish that task. but the lack of know-how can't explain what we see right now which is a lack of experimentation, and a failure to address or get rid of clearly failed programs or policies. one good example of that is the master's degree premium that we pay in incremental and salary pay for teachers holding master's degrees. there's an enormous amount of evidence that there is very little relationship if any between holding a master's degrees and effectiveness in the classroom. everyone in the research community agrees on this. everyone in districts and states understands this yet, when i and colleagues propose this to the state board of education they thought how could we free up resources in order to deal with the downturn in revenue they are experiencing in the city of florida, we were laughed out of the room, because that benefit is taken for granted.

a third possible factor, the cultural norms and bureaucratic inertia, the tendency to act without subtracting. i think these are important characteristics. there is definitely a culture within school districts that pain should be shared equally that leads us to rely on an across-the-board pay cut-- across-the-board cuts in order to share the pain equally. there is the notion deeply held among many educators that all teachers need to be paid the same, that. >> matt science the special-education teachers more in few of their scarcity would be someone there. those factors are all important but i really think that all these first three factors are secondary and they stem from the underlying politics. we need to ask not what information is needed but why doesn't the information already exist? and that is important because if you provide the information

without changing the fundamental political incentives, then why would you expect the actual decisions to change? so providing the information on its own without addressing the intensives people have to use this information is not going to accomplish much. similarly, trying to change the culture without asking why the culture has been allowed to persist for so long will it accomplish much. so, i only have a few minutes but on the political front what seems to be important? i think there three ways to think about it. first of alleged coup pressures within school districts, public information and opinion and state and federal policy constraints. w.i.c. has this done a study of school board members reporting the groups that are active in school board elections and as you see there is a wide range of groups that are very active in schooard elections, but more often than not the most active group by far are in fact the

employees of school districts as teachers' unions. y ranjit scoops able to be influential in the context of school board elections? it has to do with the fact that they are held in different times that of regular or general where primary elections. their low turnout often in the single digits. as a result there is little information so is not surprising superintendents report in surveys that their boards are quite sensitive to group pressures. how are group's influential in school board elections? >> sarlo spending affairs so as not to campaign contributions rather by getting their members to turn out a boat and terry is on the best teddy of turnout and school board elections from a limited study but what he finds is that teachers who both live and work in the district by which they are employed give themselves a stake in and, more than five times as likely to turn out to vote them are registered voters more generally. the same applies to a lesser

extent to whether school district employees. he also finds not surprisingly that endorsements appear to have a big influence on the outcomes of school board elections, so comparable to the impact of incumbency so if you are in endorse incumbent your risen chelan deceivable in the context of the school board election. we see the same pattern in national data where we ask about self reported turnout and you can see that three times as many americans say they voted as did vote but the difference is there is just the same. so it is not surprising collective bargaining agreements tend to reflect union interest. in terms of public knowledge, we have done a lot of work looking at what americans understand and we find that americans are very uninformed about school spending. the andress nate per-pupil spending by more than $5,000. the median response when you ask what people spend as roughly

$2,000, exactly $2,000. the underestimate teachers' salaries and their state by more than $14,000 if you provide them with information on these matters, it reduces support for spending and salary dramatically. interestingly americans are much better informed about student outcomes. they provide reasonably accurate information about national ranking on international test and graduation rates. utt the grades they assigned to their schools reflect publicly available data on school quality. finally on these barriers, and then i promise i will stop, and a third set of barriers state and federal policyte should be t of the solution. more often than not it is part of the problem. i think there are two areas that we need to pay attention to hear. what is the incentives built into funding systems. many of the funding systems at the state and federal level actually rewards spending for its own sake.

the best example is title one which is based in part as a percentage of what states are already spending. that is designed to encourage states to spend more about what it means is you are penalized for efficiency in hands and see-- enhancing the forms a few were able to achieve that without affecting student outcomes. similarly supplement maintenance of effort tie provisions can actually penalize states and districts for efficiency gains and in the area of special education many states have systems that actually create incentives for over identification so it district that is paid more for students it identifies for special education is very little incentive to actually go about trying to identify if you were students in the way that superintendent lavinson was able to do. and then a whole series of laws and regulations and you can read them there, and the solutions i think really have to do with changing these political incentives. changing the way school board elections are conducted,

educating and mobilizing the public, it means the state and federal policymakers getting out of the way and finding a way to continue to put pressure on school districts to improve their performance so that we really can't take an experimental approach to figuring out what to do next. >> thanks marty. that is a lot of food for thought and i am pretty confident that in the next hour think we are going to generate a whole lot of suggestions and feedback that can help structure that conversation. speaking of which, lily i'm sure you have got a couple of thoughts and what we have heard so far. >> i'm not sure whether i was invited to serve on this panel because i'm vice president of the nea or because i'm a sixth grade teacher from utah and we can stretch the dollar until you can see through it. i taught for 20 years and i have saved a lot of pennies in my utah classroom, and i've

witnessed first-hand a lot of decisions that were penny-wise and pound-foolish, and good lord, we had better be smart enough to know the difference. there is too much at stake to get this wrong so i just want to say how much i appreciate you but consider this important enough to hold this form and for all of you that think it is important enough to attend, because i am sick and tired of failing to make things better. you know what nea we are really really could that fighting what we consider to be that bad things and when you defeated bad thing your victory is that you get to keep what you already have, and how was that a victory when what you have is not good enough? i don't want a win to mean we get to keep what we have got. i want a win to mean that what we have gets better and it is not going to get better unless

educators reached towards people we are not used to working and playing well with, the business community, the policy wonks, the taxpayers association, the parents, the grandparents and you know there are times when nea really did think we didn't need those folks. we didn't need many of you in this room, that we could do it by ourselves. we would get a certain school board, get a governor elected come get a certain law passed and then we would get a little bit more of what we needed and then everything would just work out fine. the thing is everything doesn't work out fine. for every single one of our kids. now, a lot of our kids are doing just great and god bless them, but to many, too many of the ones that need us the most aren't just fine and what we have doesn't work for every student and it is not going to unless we learn how to do things a lot smarter.

you sent the presentations in advance, the to papers we looked at and asked us to respond to those and i did my homework. i really liked the first paper, please don't hold that against dr. childress. she goes back to the studies in the 1960's and what we learned from those business models that are still relevant to us, analyze the cost of getting what you want, commit the resources to pursue the best opportunities that lead you towards what you want and then decide what gets more resources, bless resources, what gets abandoned and of course that was in the 60's so i will simply say wouldn't that be groovy if that was how it worked, but you and i know that is not how it works, not in business, not in government and certainly not in education because every step along that seemingly simple continuum is debatable.

but, it is the foundation debate we never have, it is the foundation primary debatable item that is never put on the table before we get into these kinds of discussions. the first item that we as a community have to come to true clarity on is not how to save a penny, not how to spend a penny. what is the purpose of the enterprise we call a public school? the purpose of the business enterprise is to make money. i have a 41 k. i hope they are making money. that is what they are supposed to do and running a business is very complicated but pretty much, you have to make money or you don't get to keep your business so strategies for success in the business world are naturally going to focus on profits, return on investments and they should. in education then, what is the return on investment that a taxpayer would consider

profitable? because that definition might be a little different if you are a taxpayer with a disabled child or a taxpayer with the gifted child or an employer of looking for engineers or an employer looking for a cleaning crew. we are dealing with very important issues in this presentation today. we have heard a paper that deals with the theories of faction, authority, allocation, do you have a plan for decision-making? do you have a resourced plan? do you have a plan to avoid alienating the people you need to make that plan work? i loved that paper and the doctor's paper too. it was a thorough analysis of what is happening in the states to save money and they are being very creative. i need a list of all of the pieces of the answers to all of the pieces of the questions, turning down the thermostats, the tax credits on solar panels, eliminating summer school, cutting positions in pay and

benefits and offering early retirement incentive packages and resending early retirement incentive packages, depending on the structure you get very different results. it went on page after page after page so here we have a blessed of cosseting measures that are happening in states. i have a list of strategy's dealing with leadership empowerment and accountability, but to what purpose? and by the way, and i cannot emphasize this enough, i am a fabulous teacher. i am truly incredible. i give myself goosebumps. i love teaching. the purpose of a public-school is not to give me a job. the purpose of a public school, if you were wondering and you will want to write this down, is to prepare each and every

individual blessed child with the skills, the attitude, the knowledge, the confidence that they are going to need to succeed in the lives they choose to live after they leave that public school system, their career lives, their personal lives, their lives as participating members of society. there is a huge debate on what they are not the definition that i know is the purpose is correct or not. there are some people who agree with me. there are other people who are wrong. and, there are people who will say that the purpose of a public school is to hit a standardized scores or even to raise graduation rates. those are not purposes. those are measurements, and they are not particularly complete measurements whether a kid chooses to be a bricklayer or stay-at-home mom or a judge.

ishi dependable? does he have a work ethic that shows pride and self initiative? county communicate? can you work is a team? can she organize the project? can they listen to information and analyze it and tell whether not they can trust the information they are getting? i want all of my children to learn all of those things and i will not consider myself a successful teacher unless they do so we can come to some agreement on the purpose of a public school, then we can start to analyze the lists in this paper and the strategies and that paper and the reports on politics and how we move forward with the 1,001 fabulous or idiotic ideas that are floating around 1,001 rooms like this all over the country, and we can find a smarter path. but, that path has got to lead to a destination worthy of the children you have sent us so let

me repeat. the important lesson that was on the powerpoint, don't get stuck in dogma. that is as important for my organization as anyone else's organization. test it decentralize. it has to be decentralized. it must have this. it can't have that. the path that is going to lead us towards our purpose may be paved by something or some combination of things that no one has even thought of yet. [speaking spanish] it is a piece of a poem, there is no path. you make the path by walking. we are going to have to walk with an open mind. we are going to have to invent better systems that make the actual sencer to the diversity of the students and their communities and the needs that we face.

no more one-size-fits-all cookie cutters. how many of you in this room right now are not educators? that is a lot of people, and my point and they do have one, is that if i leave you with nothing else i want to leave you especially those of you who are not educators, with this. be smart. make me your partner. make my organization, my teachers, my support staff your partners and not because you feel warm and fuzzy antitrust me. i don't trust you. i don't know you. you never call, you never write. we don't know each other but i'm really smart, and i will buy you a beer and i will argue with you, and i will listen to your ideas and maybe you will listen

to my ideas. i will work with you. i have to. i have to make this work. more than you do. my colleagues and i have more skin in this game than anyone outside the kids and we are talking about decisions to cut or enhance or add or eliminate something that will mean the success or failure of an enterprise that has for many of us been much more than our careers. it has been the love of our lives. i'm going to make an offer to you, those of you who were not in education in the next three months i'm going to be traveling of around the country. we have a series of conferences in different forms and i'm going to be speaking to thousands and thousands of nea members and their leaders from literally, literally every single state and even our department of defense schools overseas and i promise you i will not be saying

anything to them that i am not saying to you today, that the status quo is not good enough, that there are smarter ways to serve our students, that it is our responsibility to say more than no, this is why this won't work, that we have to take responsibility to be honest partners in finding what does work and we have to engage, and ways we never have before. we have to start thinking in ways we never have before. that is my offer but i also have been asked. i ask each of you to spend five minutes, half an hour, whatever it takes, answering for yourselves and your heart the question, what is the purpose that we are trying to achieve for 52 million public-school

students? what would success look like for them? what is the promise of public education that we are willing to make to them? and how many pennies would it take to fulfill that promise? it is a very simple homework assignment and if we do it, then we find a better path then we will succeed. and on behalf of myself than 3.2 million educators that i represent, we, like you, have no intention of failing. thank you for the honor of being here. >> thank you lily. that was groovy. [laughter] and, the white. as a commissioner who has all these questions. what are your thoughts? >> first of all thank you rick and i have to fur sayyed i know my response is not to be to my colleagues directly to the right, but i did have a

conversation with tony salazar, this c ebay president in colorado and i said, so i will be doing this response with lily. tell me a little bit about her and she said-- he said she is very good and he said she will connect with the crowd and book connect with you right away. i said wow, so when she first pat-down guess the first question she asked me? how about those cowboys? she knows i'm a big dallas cowboys fan and that is just amazing so very, very good. and immediately she became my friend just cheering for the cowboys. thank you very much for this opportunity to respond on behalf of the department of education. both of us get a chance to respond on these papers many times are blamed for a lot of things, and in some cases we are very guilty. rick, i certainly appreciate you putting this conference together with support.

it is necessary that we have these kinds of conversations. also, i would certainly like to go on record with staceyann chin for their papers, i agree but lily they were very informative and helpful. what typically happens, it was a good outline of kind of what the issue is and some good suggestions on how we might go about solving it. i typically find when i am dealing with educators who typically respond in a linear kind of way, we respond based on what we know. it is hard-pressed to get outside of what we know so we are not very nonlinear in our approach so i certainly found some of the responses were the same, that we figure out a better way to do it and sometimes that better ways based on that we call it something different. i also would like to start my comments by starting out similar to how start out a lot of my conversations in colorado with the legislature and the governor or the state board of education and that is with all due

respect. i have found that if i start most sentences with all due respect i have already achieved permission for things i might say that they may not agree with. so, to this group with all due respect. i do think there are some elephants in the room that we have addressed on a small scale, but really haven't jumped with both feet in. some of those have been mentioned certainly, and in some cases there has been some suggestions on how we might respond. there has been just a small response to leadership. certainly we have talked a lot about funding. we have talked a little bit about the adults that are in schools. we haven't talked a lot about about bargaining agreements in the impact bargaining agreements have on our system. we spend just a brief time on choice and the benefits of choice. i certainly appreciate what john spoke to earlier but certainly know there's a lot of choice

options out there and no one really spoke to outside of just barry theory briefly on state departments, or the u.s. department of education and health sometimes we are more the problem then we are the solution so what i would like to do is just very briefly in my ten minutes to certainly highlights things that were in the papers that i think brought some of these things to light, but certainly to put the conversation out there and i hope we have a conversation with you and he will push us further on some of those things that i certainly think our elephants in the room that we haven't addressed as much as we should. let's start with leadership. we certainly no sustained leadership really matters it we know especially in our urban districts sustaining that leadership is very difficult. superintendents tenure continues to be in some cases three to five years and in many cases less. dakota kansas city, missouri or other places where they have had more superintendents than they have had years so leadership

matters and we have put superintendents and i've heard some of the palace b2 superintendents need to be courageous and take the bull by the horns. pretty hard to do and our current structure. superintendents typically are moved for being, or remove for being courageous and in many cases as difficult for them to do. i think will not spend enough time focusing on teacher leaders. there has been a mention the teacher leaders, not the teachers are going to become principles. actually developing teacher leaders actually help sustain a school especially in this time of leadership turnover, and so those teachers typically are going to be there when that new and young principle comes in with all the ideas on how they are going to change the school though most of the teachers know they are going to be there after that person leaves as well so the focus and development on teacher leaders certainly can

have a big impact and i think it is not trying to prepare teachers to be principles. most teachers to want to have an opportunity to stay engaged with their kids. you heard my teacher friend next door talk about the power of being a teacher and she loves being a teacher and you heard her say herself that she is a darned good one so, get for an opportunity to be a leader. i think the union is doing that and i wonder how often we are doing that in our schools. keeping stakeholder stem mind. we have got to encourage by superintendents but i it's that strong courage and leadership by superintendents is just an election away from substantial change with that courage and leadership will go to the next district, and so i do think there is an opportunity for states to provide leadership in just a moment in my closing i will speak to that. funding. the easy part, stay ceaser clearminded in her paper, the easy part of the cuts of party

been done in june talked to a lot of business managers and some superintendents the colorado. it is amazing how in some cases we haven't had to make near as large a cut to some other states but we have far to make cuts around the edges, so it is nice to have a conference like this to talk about how we start to make some of the difficult cuts that are yet to come. in our state, i can tell you that the 6% decrease in funding that most districts are going to get orkut spur say that they are going to have to embrace, will be small compared to 2011 and 2012 and when you have cut everything, and we have heard certainly that personnel takes up a large part of the budget, so when you have cut around the edges and done all of those things, how are you going to effectively address personnel? ..

>> in one of the papers they highlighted the bargaining agreement or the contract in milwaukee. and i don't know if you're familiar with that are not. i just recently became familiar with it. it was unbelievable to be some other things that have been bargained away. and what typically happens, and

i've been a superintendent, and i've also been at the bargaining or the negotiations table, and certainly did my best work in all good faith, that typically becomes the lingo we say we're doing things in good faith. and i just wanted whose faith. because typically what has happened over time as we bargained away things that really matter. if you think about in milwaukee, that they have to fund for part-time employees full medical costs and full retirement, there's no way a system can sustain that over time, especially in a downturn. it's difficult to do. we've got to come back to the table, certainly take my partner up on saying we got to be a partner in this. and we got to have conversations about how we redress some of those things that have been put into contracts when there was not money. typically, that's what happens is overtime, certain things the road when there are no resources or dollars to put on the table.

so now that there are not a lot of dollars, i wonder what will be bargained away in some of the upcoming contract negotiations that's going to take place now. in our state it's been a difficult process. and i do consider the union in a state to be an excellent partner. we come together on some very, very tough conversations, especially as it relates to our race to the top application that we believe colorado would be a winner. i am down to one minute. let me kind of run through that. i do want to mention on bargaining agreements, that i do think that the taliban in the room that's got to be addressed. especially in this downturn. i do think it would take a partnership. i am also a firm believe that teachers are not to blame. to many of our systems, we want to blame the teachers and they are not to blame. the system is to blame. and teachers operate typically in very, very poor systems. so in our renegotiations, i do think we've got to really take a look at the system. in our state, we do what's called a tell survey.

that tells her that allows teachers and an anonymous way to talk about the working conditions. working conditions and some of the schools and districts in our state are not fit. but the state has a role to play to say we have to improve those working conditions and one way to improve that you got to publish exactly what folks that are in doing the work actually say. i will wrap up right now. the second thing i think you've got to be able to do, is to work with your teachers as my colleague talks about, identifying what the purpose is. and a purpose for me when i was a student, or purpose for the 800,000 plus students that i support as commissioner of education, is that kids actually achieve better. and at the end of the day, i just don't get very far from if you are able to read, write and do math and you will. and what a difference that can make a difference for all kids. in our state we put some policy

approaches together. is an opportunity exists in conversation, i'd like to go through those because i think we've built a roadmap, that starts to do with -- >> let me start. >> go ahead. >> i will do that. thank you for the exit time. one has been sent a bill to 12 it is deals with standards and assessments. i do think you have to be pretty clear about what you want students to know and be able to do. i think you got to build an assessment system that is a fair measurement of accountability around whether or not they are able to do it. and so senate bill 212 totally revamped our standards and assessment systems, standards are now benchmark internationally, which we know that our youngsters are going to have to compete outside the walls of our district. certainly, the walls of our state, that they got to compete in other places. and so pretty happy about that. and assessment, it's more than just filling in a bubble. i think there's room for

simulation. technology has come a long way. i think you can do assessments. they are a lot more fair and that's a system where trying to build in colorado. senate bill 163, accountability and support, you notice i said accountability and support. typically, our old system was just on accountability. most of that account until he was on the backs of teachers. day in many cases did not have some of the autonomy based on certain conditions. so you've got to be strong accountability system, but you also got to build a system of support. that's where i think states come in. we work on creating resources and technical support. research around what works under what conditions with what groups at what cost. just think if we could take back to our legislature clear, clear, data that support what really does work. under what conditions, with what groups of youngsters, and at what cost. i've asked the legislator -- legislators in colorado to give

us no more money until we can actually answer those questions for them, because they should place a very fierce resources on things that should work. the growth model, some of you are, and with the colorado growth model. we did it and opened sorts so other states, because it takes into account where students actually start. what teachers in our state have been saying is not very fair, i'm not lucky, and lucky in our state in some cases is whether you are in schools where the students were white and wealthy. if you were in schools where the kids typically came with a different skin tone, and were not wealthy, you got held to the same data point, just based on whether or not where the kids -- not with the kids started, just how they were able to demonstrate proficiency. so a fair model using growth really identifying where a kid starts, and taking them forward so you are accountable for the

growth. teachers seem to think that's a lot more fair. finally, we got to involve parents. there are parents in room here. we publish that data. make it available so that anyone can click on the website in any school and do an apples to apples comparison, meaning the same demographic makeup of one school, same demographic of another school, even if it's across the state, how do they compare based on growth. and parents will actually start to drive the change, and i think that's where it should be. so we have to give parents the information. we also do a parent portal so parents can look at the data of their kids and look at schools and look at schools across the state. but more important in the parent portal we say when you go to a parent teacher conference, here's the suggested questions you should ask about the growth of your youngster. and here are potential answers you should look for in a response is. empower parents to ask as we say, change conversations in colorado. we think pierce will change that. then finally, the last is senate

bill 130 which is innovation zones. giving district in schools the opportunity to waive many of the state regulations that are hindrance. so the state getting out of the way. as getting out of the way. as well as getting outside bargaining agreements. we know that to renegotiate some of the contracts are going to be impossible, so through innovation zones, schools don't have to become a charter to actually have that kind of autonomy and likability. they can be approved by the state board of education through senegal 130, and innovation zones to get outside of some of those regulations. >> thank you, dwight. i want to throw it out to the audience at the moment. first i just like to get folks a couple of opportunities to clarify a couple of things that struck me. that i'd like us to bush on a bit. stacy, one of the things that you discuss in your paper that you briefly mentioned is that even some of these really claimed initiatives that you look at the terrific work.

tend not to really involve rethinking the cost structure of school. i mean, it strikes me, perhaps my impression, that we keep saying it's not just about cutting cost. it's got to be about effluence ubiquitous as we start talking about abstraction of programs, we forget all about cost cutting and we are talking about new initiatives. >> that's exactly right. in fact, the three examples in the paper, not only do they not rethink the structure of the kaw structure at the school level, of delivering instruction, and animating feature of the strategy is to increase the cost structure in certain schools, and not others. in order to accelerate the progress in some schools and hold constant or incrementally improve in others. so that is absolutely the case.

>> what would it take for us to talk about excellence and rethinking cost structure? is the one big piece of advise you that throughout the? >> i think this has come up a number of times today. without a forcing function, like the inability to behave that way anymore, it's difficult to imagine that the incentives are in place. do not continue to lie on new costs in order to not disrupt any political arrangement and very fragile stakeholder coalitions that get built around certain efforts. and so the larger point is that behaviors that lead to results, that were grounded in some good thinking about which behaviors would lead to increased

outcomes, is actually transferable. and becomes even more important when you also have to add in the task of not just producing better results, but doing it with fewer resources. >> and kind of building on that point, in speaking to these folks who are out there in the field trying to find these creative ways to make these numbers work, was there one particular source of frustrati frustration, or frustration that they expressed that really struck you as to why more of their peers weren't able to do this work? or why they couldn't necessarily act on the ideas that they actually had? >> i think the ideas were so small that there was no big idea that they could take and save one large hunk of money. they were dealing with so many different little issues, that they were hoping that all of these little things would add up

to something substantial. so there was no impediment that prevented them from doing any of these things, except of course the lack of ideas. and i think perhaps a book like this will help exchange of those ideas. i don't think anyone was standing in the way of them, rightsizing schools. i mean, politically. again, it was such a malcolm of small ideas that there was really no one there. >> what's your sense of why the ideas were small? >> again, because they're trying to cut around the edges. they left with the union contracts, which defined benefits and salaries. and that takes up 80%, 75 to 90 percent of their budgets. that leaves them with very little money. i use the example of in arizona, they have passionate after

subtracting energy cost, they have 4% left to play with. that doesn't give you a lot of room to come up with big ideas. it's the big ideas, staffing, and benefits, are off the table. then you're left with a lot of little ideas. >> one thing you mentioned, which led to address it briefly at the end, so i don't know if folks realize just how incendiary, but you seem to suggest that the federal language relating to maintenance of effort, which of course is teacher promenade in the stimulus funding, and federal language regarding supplement, that these are actually potentially bad ideas in terms of running cost effective schools going forward. did i hear you right? >> i think you did. maybe i did know quite how in cyndy airey suggestion that might be. but i think for example, i know

this is playing a big role in the race to the top funny right now, and the question of how seriously maintenance of effort requirements will be enforced in order for states to be competitive, for race to the top isn't open when. i would like to suggest that it's not necessarily the case that these provisions are a good idea. that we've had a lot of evidence presented today that there may well be more efficient ways of doing things, the folks at mckenzies, the folks at bcg, as well as john child and stephen wilson, have made the case that we can cut costs while maintaining service quality. and if that's the case, then why do we want to keep a set of policies in place that penalizes people for actually trying to achieve that goal? another thing to keep in mind is that if you go back to title i,

the purpose there was two and cenobites spending. the idea of having federal aid be a percentage of what you are already spending at the state level. the incentives that that provides is not strong enough to really drive up state spending by a significant amount. and so, so i think yeah, i think we should seriously revisit those policies. >> wheldon, in light of that, marty, is your sense of terms of overcoming and changing the policy environment so that it becomes more possible to make the political decisions that might actually start to change cost structures, is race to the top helping on this count? is it having no effect on this count armida potentially be hurting on this account? >> so i'm a cautious optimist on race to the top. and i guess i don't see the

relation to the prior question. >> let me suggest, let me throw to two thoughts that are occasionally murmur. not said too often in polite society about race to the top. one, is that most of the 19 priorty's around race to the top are about encouraging states to launch or expand program offerings. whether it comes to stem, teacher preparation, or whether it comes to local farming schools on a variety of fronts. and the second is that in the midst of a window or state legislatures are dramatically downsizing, they are likely k-12 spending going forward, we see enormous energy invested in state departments of education, not in trying to figure out how to leverage the downsizing opportunity, but into putting together expansive grant proposals to try to fill part of that gap for a 12 month window.

>> so those are both perfectly valid concerns. there's -- was a delegate is trying to do is to stimulate innovation that as i said, we don't have the right idea of how to do all these things. so it's trying to come up with a set of priorities and to encourage innovation within that space. state government has tried to do the same thing all the time. tried to walk the line between mandating districts do something specifically when not knowing exactly the right way to do it, and so the federal government here is trying to do that same thing. and i think there's lot to be said for that approach. when you put into context of the economic downturn, i think you're exactly right, that this becomes a concern that maybe they are not investing in the right priorities, it's a real need right now is downsizing. my hope would be that the proposals that states will come up with will take the fiscal

situation going forward seriously, and the debugger will and its peer reviewers will take that into account, the extent to which this is a viable plan going forward. you know, they're looking for evidence of political buy-in that they should be looking for evidence of a fiscal plan. i don't know which that'll be the case. >> dwight, as a man who's been in the midst of this conversation, what are your thoughts on these questions of cost structures? >> i do agree with martin that i do think the administration is trying to push innovation. i think states that can use innovation, not to mess up your conference, i know this is a penny saved, chased a shiny penny. i do think states that actually use that to actually expedite their own reform structure, so in colorado we believe that we have a lot of the right reforms in place. and so race to the top

potentially gives us an opportunity to it, in some cases, fund some of those reforms that i think like a lot of districts, as shared in the papers today, that use are pretty good initiatives, but can you sustain them or can you steal them? so if that opportunity i think you figure out any short-term how you might scale or sustain some pretty good reform initiatives. while you either the economy recovers or you figure out a better way to fund them going forward, and then i also think that the department is pushing us around teacher effectiveness. the most points that you can get an application is around teacher effectiveness, and if you look at evaluation systems, across this country they are horrid. i mean, no wonder teachers are upset. you know, how do you start talking about this danger when you have an evaluation system that is really is not fair. in our state, we either have satisfactory or unsatisfactory. and guess how many other teachers in our state are listed as satisfactory?

99.99%, because the difference is just in unsatisfactory category. so i think we have to deal with a violation and administration is pushing states to do that. then you do with compensation dismissal. certainly placement as well as develop of teachers. so i've been very, very supportive of their push around teacher effectiveness, and pushing states to get outside of the cover sewn in this area. >> lily, where do you stand, what's the one thing the federal government is doing or could be doing or should be doing that might be most constructive in terms of helping us address these costs in a way that respects the purposes of school? >> race to the top isn't about saving money. it's about getting money. that's the only reason i'm guessing in colorado and other states like-minded people are racing to put together a plan so they can get more money. because we need it.

but if i was to look at -- i don't know where it will end the. i don't know if we will end up finding some real good ideas and things that were just not good ideas. but what race to the top has in it that i think is something we can latch onto is it really does have this model that says we expect to see evidence that you put the teachers voice in here, the parents for dinner, the researchers of voice in here, that you have community buy into this. it really has a model. we talked a lot about collective bargaining. this has a collective ownership of stating the purpose of what you are trying to achieve with race to the top. a collective ownership of the design, a collective ownership of the implementation, coming up with how you going to measure it, what are the proper

measurements, what evidence are you going to show that this is making a difference in the lives of children. that's the exact model that you're going to need in the tough times that we do live in. nobody is being an ostrich and saying let's pretend like we have all the money we've always wanted. we don't. and it's going to be like this for a long time. but if we're going to make the smart decisions about what gets more and what gets less and what gets eliminated, it can't be just a school board or just the superintendent or just the administrators going in and say, okay, we make those tough decisions, and then we tell our staff, then we tell the parents, then we tell the community what we are cutting. and we're not doing. that's a recipe for disaster. you have to bring the right people in and it has to be -- there has to be a collective ownership of what the best move forward could possibly be.

that's the way we need to get things done. >> let's open it up to the audience. will givebecause i know you guya question on the maintenance effort. >> cindy brown from the center for american progress. yeah, i want to return to martin. about maintenance of efforts, supplement. i can tell how he looks versus how i look that he wasn't around when the violations, the tremendous violations that occurred in the early days of title i that led to putting in those provisions, and a continuing violation. lots of documentation by marguerite rose and others. about high poverty schools not getting the share of money that they would get if you invested according to needs of gets. so my question is, do you have

evidence that maintenance of effort and supplement supplant undermine efficiency, or are you just positing that? i don't know if you -- if your paper gets into this or not. >> i'm just positing this at this point. i understand the history of these provisions. and i understand their importance. i think that we need to find other ways to try to account which those same goals that allows districts to document their success in serving students, and to use that as a way to be able to adjust their spending without being harmed for doing so. so i think this is an area where i think we need to try new approaches. and i'm particularly concerned with the basic structure of title i funding, which is a different issue than the issue of maintenance of effort and

supplement not supplant. and here i think it's more clear that -- that having your title i funding a percentage of which are already spending actually has overtime not done well by the states that need the most assistance from title i. and so, i actually think that's an area where there is a clear answer, and policy needs to be addressed. the other one is where we need to start think about ways in which we can bring in information about the performance of students in order to allow districts to go in a direction that currently they would be penalized for. >> okay. right here. >> hi. michael rebel from the campaign for educational equity and teachers college. i want to keep going on this point that cindy brought up, because what's concerning me in this discussion about title i maintenance of effort, and many other things today is the word

equity is not mentioned. we talk about purposes of education. will -- the well-rounded liberal arts student is an important purpose, but one of our national purposes according to no child left behind, according to state standards reform, is overcome the achievement gap, bringing the kids who are not doing well up. none of that's been discussed today, even rick, you talked about can we have excellent cautioned that we used to say can we have excellence in excellency. we're not saying that. we've been tracking this bending of the stimulus fund, and once that's been doing with state education finance systems recently and what we're finding is that there is a severe trend toward cutting funding for equity. so maybe there are other mechanisms that are better than supplant and supplement. but nobody's been talking about them. until you mentioned that as a side comment, nobody talked

about those things today. so the only pitch i would make is, i'm all for cost cutting. that's what i can get a. we have to do it intelligently but we have to do insensitively for the kids that are most disturbed by our system today. and i just wish that emphasis would be more in the conversation. >> stacy, do you want to say a word about that? >> one thing i didn't take time to talk about in the live presentation that is probably the bulk of my paper, description or discussion of the three district strategies, or specifically aimed at closing the achievement gaps as they look in those particular school district. at the heart of those strategies, which is why it would be interesting to include in this particular paper, was a different way of thinking about resource allocation, the recognition not only that some kids with particular learning needs might cost more in absolute terms to educate, but they were already getting less than kids in other parts of town. and so the challenge in those

districts now looks different than it did when those strategies were launched some decade ago or seven or eight years ago when budgets were still growing, and you could, use a robin hood type of approach of slowing or stopping growth in some parts of town or county in some schools while growing in others and using a couple of different mechanisms to do that. the point i tried to make in the paper is that some districts in the paper were better than others at preserving the fragile coalition that it takes politically to make that happen in a way that no positions them well during times in which they have to cut budgets, that are now actually those pain points are going to begin to touch the more affluent parts of the county or the district that were quite willing as long as their services were not getting cut, to fund increases in other

places. and so in districts in which they kind of offended the people whose pockets they were picking to fund the other part, it's a much more difficult task now to preserve the strategy that they believe was working in the form of under resourced schools. asked a course with outsized voice is. so this one point, josé actually mentioned that when you kind of matchup early childhood versus extracurricular, the extra curricular parents show up and yell when you're cutting, even though he knows that the payoff on investment in early childhood are much greater over the long-term. it's a very difficult choice to make. and if the politics have been set up in a way that this is not going to become a more difficult fight as the budget cuts will start to touch programs like the extracurricular, or resources in the affluent parts of the district, that becomes more difficult to do.

>> marty, did you want to jump in the? >> no. i thought it was a well -- your point is very well taken. that's an important part of the goals that we need to make sure our prioritize. >> i would just add that stacy's exactly right in her paper, she gave some pretty good examples, especially through leadership with the administration, where they push really getting more significant resources to try to systematically affect the achievement gap of the youngsters that were underperforming or a focus on struggling schools before it became so popular from the administration, hoaxes have been focusing on struggling schools for a while. i thought the montgomery county example was a good example of the red and green zones, even though they didn't cut funding, or at least it didn't appear, they just didn't continue to give some of the same increases to the green zones but they didn't cut it, but the red zones that were. and it was nice that i was also done in partnership with the teachers union.

so when it came time that resources actually decreased, the teachers actually forgo -- forgone an increase to actually sustain the initiatives that were going on in the red zones. so i do think some of the papers really spoke to that, and that's a really good example. i know the superintendent was here and talk about the partnership that they had in their district, that really allowed them to make some difficult decisions. now they got to make more difficult decisions and it's going to even be tougher. >> while we are talking about equity, i can't let that go by without talking about adequacy. as well. because we're talking about saving pennies and dollars and all the rest that there is an assumption, and i said it before. we are in tough times, and we acknowledge that. but we also know that what needs to be analyzed are a lot of the economic development giveaways,

that many of our communities have experienced. were in the name of economic development you give huge tax breaks to folks, and you disrupt the foundation of your funding sources in a school district. so i think that's the other thing that people need to be looking at. we do have tight budgets, but some of them are tighter than they really should be. and some folks have been given breaks on their taxes that are not producing the same kind of economic development payoff that a fabulous public school will produce. >> okay. and i think with that, we'll call erica back up your. i would just like to say i think it's been a terrific session, terrific day. it's been a delight doing this partnership with fordham and i'm going to turn it over to you, eric. >> thank you. just want to come up and say thank you. thank you to this panel and all the panels today. i think they all deserve a huge

round of applause. [applause] >> and just a couple of quick words of thanks and announcements. again, thank you to rick and aei for this great partnership. there's a lot of staff at fordham and aei that deserve to be named. i won't name them all but i will point out a couple who worked really, really hard. in the fading from fordham. and jenna from aei for putting in long, long hours. thank you both. thank y'all very much. thank you also to the trust whose funding makes this whole project possible. please don't forget that there are copies of the papers in the hallway. also on aei's website. while you are on their website please consider signing up for their next event on january 27th and titled educational reform, reviewing the obama administration's first year. while you are online and had your calendars open, please go to foreign website and sign-up for our next event on the 28th entitled schools around,

exciting. i definitely hope to see there. in the meantime, last and most important, please join us down the hall in the chinese room for someone that i hope to see conversation about how school districts can tighten their belts while serving students better. thank you so much. [applause] [inaudible conversations] [inaudible conversations] [inaudible conversations] [inaudible conversations]

>> that the defense on veterans affairs department holding a conference on soldier and veterans. with veterans affairs secretary eriksson says he and defense department health officials this is about an hour and 15 minutes.

>> how exciting. what an audience here. we have about a thousand folks have signed up for this conference. so we are excited to have you here. this is our second annual d.o.d. be a suicide prevention conference. we have been putting together quite the agenda for your. we had over 100 presenters this week up through thursday so we are excited. some of the most well-known experts in the field of suicide so we got quite the agenda. i'm commander janet hawkins and i'm the chair of the suicide prevention committee. public health service officer that is with the defensive centers for excellence for psychological health and traumatic brain injury. what i'd like to do is take a few minutes to go over some administrative and announcements. during all in and breakout sessions please silentio cell phones and pdas and please do not turn them to vibrate as this can also be distracting in a session and interfere with the audience facials in the room.

we have generally allowed 15 is between sessions. so please be mindful of the time in order to get to your next session probably. so that we can stay on schedule. and as you can tell we've already a little behind the curve so we really want to make sure with sony folks we stay on target. there are restrooms located on each floor of the hotel and when sessions are being held, if you have not done so already, please be sure to sign up at the registration desk. each breakout session you will be evaluated individually each breakout session will be evaluated individually, so please place your completed evaluations in the collection boxes located outside of each realm and at the registration desk. per policy, ees requires 100% confident in his two received cce's. so a completion will be e-mailed to you after you submit the final conference evaluation. for additional information, please review the blue sheet of paper in your folder.

as far as administered announcement, and now i would like to introduce you to my cochair of this conference, dr. jan kemp. [applause] >> jan and i are sincerely hope that the conference will meet your expectations and provide all of us with ideas and lessons we can learn to take back home and for the future. if you have any concerns or questions or ideas, please feel free to find either one of us. we have also would like to pay, have you take a look at your agenda. it has the requirement would put on the agenda for folks that as a go through this process, we've got -- you're able to use that quiet room every day if you find that the topics are a little difficult for you, we want to make sure you have someone that you're able to go just for a short break if you're needing to do that. now what i would like to do is introduce you to the director of

defense, brigadier general sutton. general sutton has been leading the go for the last two years and is very passionate about the issues of suicide prevention and resilience. general sutton? [applause] >> thank you so much, commander hawkins, for you and the work your entire team has done in bringing this meeting to get that i'd like to welcome everyone of you here today to this, the second annual d.o.d., va conference on suicide prevention. would have a number of leaders, very distinguished guests who will be joining us today, some who are already here. i'd like to give a special welcome to miss alan embree, performing the duties of the acting of the assistant secretary of defense for health

affairs. secretary shinseki of course we'll be here and about half an hour. we're order to have a doctor is the chief of patient care services at the va. we also have lieutenant general richard zellmer was the deputy commander for manpower and reserve affairs for the marine corps. we also have rear admirals daniel holloway, who is the director of manpower personnel training and education for the united states navy. were also very pleased to welcome major general phil was the deputy commander for the joint task force capital medicine. we have also rear admiral david smith was the joint staff sergeant. we also have brigadier general byron hepburn who is the deputy surgeon general for the united states air force. we're also pleased to have bonnie carroll who of course many of us know her in her role as director of tabs which she and general are the cochairs of

the d.o.d. task force on suicide prevention. so please join me in welcoming our distinguished guests. [applause] >> i can't say what it is to look across this audience to know that of all of the things that are to many our tension, at our post cams stationed in community, that each of you would make this a priority. clearly, it speaks volumes. this is not business as usual. we are here over the next few days to learn, to share, to grow, to connect. as i look across this room, i see colleagues and friends from the va. i see folks from across the services, army, navy, air force, marine corps, coast guard, public health service. icn ceos, the backbone of our

military. i see retirees. i see windows. i see family members. who have survived the tragedy of suicide, and who are truly our best experts from whom we must learn, and for whom we must continue to support. please join me in thanking the suicide family survivors who are here to teach us this week. [applause] >> a wise person once said, be kinder than necessary. for everyone we meet, is fighting some sort of battle. i know i am. i know you are. those battles are not limited to

the war zone. they take place on the homefront. they involve struggles with injuries that are moral, physical, psychological, spiritual, seen and unseen. and they also lead to the potential for us to claim strength, no matter how diverse our experience has been. over the next few days, we had the opportunity to learn new and better ways of strengthening individuals and communities to build resilience, to maximize recovery, and to foster reintegration at all levels. you know, preventing suicide involves much more than

recognizing and acting on the terminal signs of hopelessness and despair. as important, of course, that awareness and those actions are. it involves for each one of us, to build amityville, grow a toolkit, a toolkit for life. one that involves tools for sleep, the number one issue affecting our troops, coming back and forth from the battle zone. it involves the tool of fuel, fuel. are we putting the kind of fuel into our bodies that helped our brains, our bodies, our souls, our spirits perform at maximum effectiveness and efficiency? got friends.

do each of us here today have at least two individuals that, if we were to reach that hour of darkness, that moment of truth, that we could call a friend? and again that human to human, heart-to-heart connection. do we belong to a team? do we fit in? those relationships are what healing is all about, what love is all about, what life is all about. got love? do we have people in our lives, pets, causes, endeavors, that we

put their needs and of our own? do we have health? held that is much more than the absence of disease, but involves the presence, presence of energy, optimism, compassion, grace, gratitude, great, and strength. do we have faith in? faith that leads us to a commitment that is greater than any of us as individuals. hope. any of us who is without hope is most at risk. growth. that potential for claiming posttraumatic growth, no matter how tough the adversity. it's there for each of us. now, granted there are other

domains resilient, but i would have to, just to say, that if everyone of our front-line leaders, those ncos, those young troops who are in the trenches, if they knew the answer to each of those questions about our troops come if we knew the answers about each of those questions, about our family members, our leaders, ourselves, and knew how to engage each other in a meaningful productive dialogue, perhaps we would be a step further away from the terminal signs of hopelessness and despair. that is our challenge. this is not business as usual. forasmuch as we had to learn, there's much that we already know. we know, for example, that preventing suicide is first and foremost, a public health challenge. think of it this way. at the center of our attention, eyes on the prize, the health and well being of our warriors,

our veterans, and yes, our families, those who are courageous enough to love us. but it goes on from there. we must build peer to peer support networks. we must build resilient families, communities, faith leaders, employers, teachers, coaches. elected officials. and yes, health care professionals. but let me be clear. preventing suicide is far too important and too enormous of a challenge to be left to the doctors. we're all in this together. we are our brothers keeper. we are our sisters keeper. we know that psychological, spiritual, and moral injuries are on a par with physical

injuries. the chairman of the joint chiefs of staff, admiral mike mullen, says that frequently. we are blessed with the strength of visionary leadership at all levels, and in both departments. we know that these invisible wounds of war, whether depression, posttraumatic stress, anxiety, concussion, traumatic brain injury, we knew that these invisible wounds are real. we know that you're not alone. i am not alone. we are all in this together. we know that treatment works. treatment based on an integrated team health model of care, that covers the entire continuum, from the point of injury or exposure or distress, all the way through, from the battlefield to the homefront, to the bedside, to the kitchen

table. and we also know, not only does treatment work, but the earlier we can intervene, the better. we know that reaching out is an act of courage and strength. as hemingway once put it, following world war i, the world breaks everyone. and many grow stronger at the broken places. finally, we must double down on our commitment to eliminate, not just to minimize, not just to reduce, but to eliminate stigma, that toxic, deadly hazard, that all too often leads to needless suffering and loss.

in summary, we are on a journey. we know that stigma can kill. hugs can he appear to work and what. treatment can work and treatment is hope that we are on a journey where perhaps, summing the wisdom of churchill, we are at that point as he put it, we are not at the beginning. this is not the end of the beginning. this is not the beginning. this is not the beginning of the impact this is perhaps the end of the beginning. a time where we can look back and learn. we can to up here today this week, go home and apply these lessons. and ask ourselves a question everyday. is what i and my team are doing today, is this action? is our effort, is it worth the?

of the service and sacrifice of those who were so privileged to serve. not content, with today's best, we must make today's best better every single tomorrow, and the day after and the day after. to this end, i am deeply honored to introduce our first guest speaker for this morning, a fellow traveler on this journey, a 34 year veteran of the department of defense. someone who is pioneered our understanding of and our efforts in support of health protection and readiness. someone who more recently i've had the opportunity, the privilege of serving with these last couple of years in the

domain of the invisible wounds of war, psychological health, traumatic brain injury. now, performing the duties of the assistant secretary of defense for health affairs, alan embree comes to us today as much more than a distinguished leader and an esteemed colleague. although she is both of those things. so many of us in this room, around the country throughout she is a mentor.s a role model. and teacher, coach. and the different. so please join me in welcoming ms. alle h.r. 1106. [applause]

>> good morning, everyone. i'm here on behalf of the secretary of defense. mr. geesman unfortunately was not available today. and so he asked me to come in and provide some opening remarks on behalf of the department. and i'm very pleased to do so. thank you, general sutton, for those very kind words and that wonderful introduction. good morning to everyone. welcome to this second annual d.o.d. on the a conference on suicide prevention. it is the only conference that established to specifically address the issue of suicide in the military and veterans population. it's very important that you all are here. it's quite obvious that you care. and you spend many of your days and nights caring about this issue, and making a difference in the lives of our

servicemembers and veterans. and their families. i want to thank the distinguished guests who are here who were mentioned earlier. and of course, i'd like to thank the chairman of the joint chiefs of staff, admiral mullen, who will be here later. he has been especially dedicated to this issue, and has been quite an advocate for the department, and helping us all to see and address as a matter of priority, the unseen wounds of war. i would also like to thank our conference cohost and partner, secretary eric shinseki when he comes, please extend my warmest regards and thanks for his support as we jointly sponsoring this conference. so, let's talk a little bit about the tragedy of suicide. every life lost to suicide is both a personal tragedy and a tragedy to society. whether civilian or military. it's a tragedy because a

precious human life has been lost. it's also a tragedy because i'm up for all of our sophisticated knowledge, we still do not know all there is to know about preventing these needless deaths from occurring. at a media roundtable last november, the army's vice chief of staff, peter carelli, briefed the press on his services suicide prevention efforts. the challenge of suicide, he said, is without a doubt the toughest i've had to tackle and 37 plus years in the army. simply stated, he said, it is not a single problem with a defined set of symptoms or markers. there are no easy answers or solutions. and as we all know, he is right on all counts. suicide is a complex issue with any number of risk factors. that is hard to predict.

and while we are alarmed at the number of suicides increasing in the military, some 311 occurred in 2009. most do not occur in the theater of operations. and most are related to the same factors that precipitate civilian suicide. substance abuse, failed marriages or relationships, and legal or financial matters. according to a 2008 department of defense report, 64 percent of those who died by suicide did not have a diagnosed psychiatric disorder. and 49% received medical behavioral and family services 30 days prior to their death. knowing this, what is it that we can do to reduce the risk and the number of suicides in the armed forces? one key way to reduce that risk

is to make sure that people understand that there are a wide variety of resources available to help them, well before they become suicidal. that means increased sensitivity to warning signs, comprehensive prevention and education and services, throughout their career and the developer cycles. innovative programs that target risk factors, and incorporate protective